How to focus your story.
Why do we write? A starter on what to consider when you’re overwhelmed with ideas.
Photo credit: I drew this confused yet happy turtle.
At any given point, a story wants to split into a thousand different threads, many of which could be worth exploring. It is, however, the unfortunate task of the writer to decide what a story will ultimately be about.
Writers know that a story without focus will bore a reader right out of finishing their work. Fortunately, there are several considerations we can make when selecting the threads we want to follow to the end.
Specificity is good, actually.
I’ve noticed many young writers avoid specificity in their stories due to a fear of alienating some readers. E.g., Not many people have been left at the altar, so I should write about the more common experience of breakups. This fear can lead to drafts that are unfocused and difficult to finish. There are two things I usually say to these writers. 1) There is nothing wrong with not appealing to everyone, and 2) people relate to character and emotion more so than specific circumstances.
It’s important to respect your readers’ ability to fill in the gaps. It doesn’t matter that few have made the trek to Mt. Doom. Frodo’s story in the Lord of the Rings still connects with millions of people. Likewise, in personal essay writing, our seemingly niche experiences can resonate farther than we ever intended.
There is nothing wrong with not appealing to everyone, and people relate to character and emotion more so than specific circumstances.
I once wrote a story about my time as a young Black-Filipino ex-political speaker grating my finger against the palm of my hand in an Austin high-rise. I wrote the story for others like me, but I was flattered that people from disparate communities reached out and related not to what I did but what I felt.
Who are we writing for?
The concern of alienating certain readers does invite a bigger question: who are we writing for?
Meaning is created by the moment-to-moment interaction an audience has with a story. We can’t control how every receiver of our art reacts to it, and us trying to reach everyone can quickly balloon our drafts. However, what we can do is consider who we want to prioritize in creating our stories.
The ongoing pirate manga series One Piece is somewhat notorious for its hesitance to kill off characters. While hugely popular across demographics, throughout its 20+ years of weekly serial publication, the author Eiichiro Oda has been consistent in his belief that his story is primarily for young children. Characters go through dramatic death scenes only to later miraculously emerge unscathed at the end of the story arc.
Where I now find myself annoyed at this quirk of his writing, I recall reading his series as a middle schooler and being so relieved when a character I liked survived the impossible. Me no longer being the primary target audience isn’t an inherent flaw in the story.
When trying to focus your story, ask yourself who is this story for and why am I making it for them? Let the answer guide what you need to include in your piece.
Another essential thing for every writer to consider is how our default assumptions about writing can pre-select our target audience. White supremacy creates pressure to write stories for white, straight, abled, American, and/or wealthy audiences. This pressure has many effects. For Black writers, some editors at non-Black publications may want you to explain basic cultural concepts that are already understood by your circles. As a result, there is little room to explore the more in-depth topic you may have wanted to write about. E.g., There is less room to talk about Afrofuturism if your editor wants you first to explain why slurs are bad.
Now explainer pieces have their merits, and minority writers have long had many ways of balancing creativity, class, survival, and politics in white-capitalist society. But to start, it is good to be aware of the audiences both writers and editors may default to catering to. Knowledge of this dynamic can make it easier to argue for what is important to you during editing or seek Black or queer-interest publications from the jump.
Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen says: “Writers from a minority, write as if you are the majority. Do not explain. Do not cater. Do not translate. Do not apologize. Assume everyone knows what you are talking about, as the majority does.”
When trying to focus your story, ask yourself who is this story for and why am I making it for them? Let the answer guide what you need to include in your piece.
Consider real-life limitations: Creating support roles.
Part of what can make our drafts so sprawling is acknowledging that the topics and characters we want to explore have a lot of depth to them. Many writers are inclined to make any given story the comprehensive piece or showcase of the subject matter. Given infinite time and space to create, this may not be a problem. But writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Publications give us word counts and deadlines. We create under financial stressors and moral obligations to our communities and environments. A writer should embrace their full positions in the world and write (or not write) accordingly.
I once pitched a personal essay about five public speeches I gave during my late teens. As I wrote, I discovered that I had more to say about each of them than I realized. Looking at the 2000 word count limit, I decided with my editor to focus the narrative around just one speech. The words I had written about the other speeches were not now useless, however. The final story still referenced the other speeches, but only in the context of what they meant for the new primary narrative.
I started with five good anecdotes fighting for space in the story. I ended up with one great anecdote with four good anecdotes supporting it. It’s a small shift, but it makes all the difference in focusing a piece.
I started with five good anecdotes fighting for space in the story. I ended up with one great anecdote with four good anecdotes supporting it.
Take a look at your draft and see if any ideas would work better in a support role. Rewrite the best ideas only in the context of how they relate to the new primary thread. This will not only help the story feel more focused, but it will build quality into every layer of the work.
What to do with all that: Looking for points of drift.
With specificity, audience, and constraints in mind, as usual, let’s wrap this by adding another technique to the repertoire: Looking for points of drift.
When you read a book and catch your mind floating to unrelated thoughts, there is a chance that the writing hasn’t done its job to grab you. Our minds start to drift, and before we know it, we are back on Instagram or fiddling with a desk toy.
When reading our own work, at the very point our eyes want to lift off the page, we have a point worth examining. Here we can ask: Do I care about what I’m saying here?
Sometimes, we are faced with a technical issue. E.g., The idea is good, but we have too many short sentences in a row, so the passage sounds monotonous. Fix that, and we’re square. Other times, we may notice that we don’t care about the idea we’re presenting at all.
At this point, we can ask, are we avoiding specificity? Are we explaining something that our intended audience doesn’t need to know? Would this idea work better in a supporting role, or do I even have the word count to tackle it at all? Hopefully, the answer to these can help us snip the threads that aren’t serving the story.
We’re only here today because focusing and, by extension, building confidence in our creative decision-making is not easy. There are rarely objectively correct answers to the questions we ask ourselves when making our art. And yet, often, we beat ourselves up as though we have somehow gotten it wrong.
It’s good to be careful with our overexposure to our drafts, and to lean on the advice of good editors and creative friendships. Often our work will benefit from the extra push, and we can see where we’ve actually been boring and where we have been too harsh on ourselves.
There are rarely objectively correct answers to the questions we ask ourselves when making our art. And yet, often, we beat ourselves up as though we have somehow gotten it wrong.
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