3 Tips and 1 Analogy for Keeping Your Writing Focused and On Point
By: Sean Myers
Tags: Photography, Writing, Writing Tips, Blogging, Focus

3 Tips and 1 Analogy for Keeping Your Writing Focused and On Point Sean Myers Follow Dec 5 · 9 min read

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash

As a professional legal blogger, I’ve written a lot of blog posts.

A lot. Of blog posts.

Over the course of that time, I have stumbled into most of the pitfalls that litter the path of a 500-word piece.

By far the most common problem is a lack of focus: I’m writing about Subject A, but Issue B keeps sneaking in.

The solution is simple — write two blog posts or, if that’s not feasible, figure out whether Issue B is relevant and, if it really is, quickly cover it so you can move on to the main topic.

But the solution is only obvious when you can see the problem.

Recognizing that you’re trying to write two different articles at the same time is the hard part.

Here are a few techniques that I’ve come to use over the past 6 years.

The problem of prerequisite knowledge

Sometimes, you’re writing an article and find yourself going back and explaining something else that needs to be dealt with first. You’re trying to write the article in 500 words, but you’ve already got 350 down before you can even begin.

An example was when I wrote a piece for a DUI-defense lawyer about problems with different breathalyzers (fun story: there are dozens of models of breathalyzers). Before I could get into the different problems that each model had, I found myself explaining the difference between the two types of breath testing machine (there are preliminary breath tests that happen during the traffic stop with a handheld device, and then there are evidentiary breath tests that happen on a bigger machine in the police station). I was also explaining the three chemical processes that preliminary breath tests use to detect alcohol (there are breathalyzers, alcosensors, and intoxilyzers).

Fun stuff, I know.

So fun that I hit my word count before I could even get to the point where I could talk about the dozens of makes and models of handheld breathalyzers. I hadn’t even dropped in the “did you know” factoid that I wanted to include (did you know that a “breathalyzer” is an example of a generic trademarked product like a Kleenex? Just like a Kleenex is a brand of facial tissue, a Breathalyzer is a brand of breath testing device).

You see the problem: Before I could talk about the dozens of different models, I had to discuss the three types of preliminary breath tests, and before I could tackle that issue, I had to differentiate between preliminary and evidentiary testing devices.

Writing a 500-word article usually takes me around 30 minutes. I was an hour in, with 750 words on my plate, and getting pissed at myself when I swore and groaned.

“I’m writing three different articles,” I grumbled.

Sure, I probably could’ve turned the 500-word article into a 1,000-word piece. But sometimes you can’t, like if your editor is expecting you to stick to the targeted word count. Regardless, you often shouldn’t — if you’re getting paid for 500 words, delivering 1,000 isn’t just a waste of time; it means you’re also burning through a potential blog topic that you could get paid for, and it creates expectations that will hurt you, later on.

I chopped the article up and wrote three pieces and, through the magic of the internet, simply linked to that which came before:

“There are dozens of preliminary breath tests [link], each of which works in one of three different ways [link].”

Don’t distract the reader

In some cases, the best writer is a good editor.

Good editors are constantly asking, “Why is this here?”

Writers should be asking that about their work, as well. Sometimes, when Issue B creeps into your article about Subject A, Issue B is either completely irrelevant or is such a minor detail that it isn’t worth taking the time to cover it, at all.

An example is this story I wrote, about poll monitoring during the 2020 election:

There’s a scene in the story where I get a text, right before polls close, to tell anyone in line that they have a right to cast a ballot if they’re already in line. However, because so many people voted absentee, there hadn’t been a line at the precinct in over 12 hours.

In real life, I read the text, looked around at the empty parking lot, and chuckled because there were, quite literally, crickets chirping in the night.

The editor told me to take out the part about literally hearing crickets in the grass. She didn’t believe that I could hear them on a 40-degree November evening in Pennsylvania.

Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me just how strange it was to hear crickets at that moment. But I had. They were everywhere at the polling precinct. When I walked through the grass, several would jump out of the way of every foot fall. They were even thicker in the mulch. They were hiding in the gap between the sidewalk and the concrete curb. I was talking with another poll worker when I stepped backwards and struggled to keep my train of thought — I’d felt one crunch under my heel.

But the crickets weren’t the story. They were just a tiny detail. Including that detail — cool as it was — would raise questions that I would then have to either leave open-ended or spend time developing.

When the editor told me I could leave the crickets in, if they really happened, I refused.

“Cool details that distract the reader,” I said, “still distract the reader.”

Keep them focused on what you’re really saying. Keep the writing tight.

Pick a feasible subject

The best way to notice that you’re trying to write two articles at once is to avoid it, in the first place.

Easier said than done, obviously. But when you write enough articles of a given length, you start to see how long it will take you to cover a topic. At this point, I can go months of legal blog writing without grumbling from the realization that I have two pieces in the same document.

The key is to simply have the capacity and the experience to foresee what you need to write about, before you write it. Unfortunately, given the wide variety of topics there are to write about and everyone’s different writing styles, this is nearly impossible to teach.

The point, though, is that if you’re a new writer — or an experienced writer, branching into an unfamiliar field — and you’re getting frustrating with yourself over how often you suddenly realize you’re writing multiple articles at the same time, just know: It gets better.

The f-stop analogy

At the risk of explaining a complicated concept with a far more complicated analogy, the article writing process is similar to a key component of photography: The f-stop, which describes the aperture or the focal length of a camera’s lens.

We’re talking about the hole in the camera lens that allows light to pass through to the inside of the camera — the hole that can be shrunk or widened by adjusting the metal blades that form its edges.

Photo by Alex Rhee on Unsplash

The size of this hole is measured in “f-stops.” Confusingly, the smaller the f-stop number, the larger the hole in the lens.

The bigger the hole in the lens, the more light gets in.

So, adjusting a camera lens to f/2 will let in a lot of light. From there, if you adjust it to f/22, the metal blades will tighten, the aperture and the hole in the lens will shrink, and less light will get into the camera.

But that’s not all that will happen.

The aperture of a camera also determines the picture’s depth of field.

Low f-stop numbers, like f/2, have a small depth of field. When you set the camera’s focus, only the objects at that distance will be clear and sharp. Everything else will be blurry and out of focus. High f-stop numbers, like f/22, have a large depth of field with everything in focus.

On left: An image with a low f-stop, with the focal point in the middle of the rope and the rest of the image out of focus | Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash. On right: An image with a high f-stop, with everything in focus | Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash.

Photographers use high f-stops for landscape shots because the subject is, well, everything. But they use low f-stops for portrait photography, headshots, or pictures where they want to focus on one particular object. By putting the rest of the picture out of focus, they eliminate any unwanted distractions.

Now you see where this analogy is going.

Writing isn’t the only medium where something can creep into, and distract from, the intended subject.

Just take a look at this photo:

Photo by Carly Gerlach on Medium

It’s still a pretty good photo. But what’s the subject, here? Based on the f-stop and blurry background, it’s intended to be the woman up front. But the colors of the houses attract the eye, in spite of their blurriness and the focal point.

Even in the foreground, there’s a distraction that pulls the viewer away from the true subject: The padlocks on the bridge. It’s one of those “love bridges,” where couples write their initials on locks and then fasten them to the rails.

It’s a pretty neat picture, but there are three photos, here: The portrait, the bridge, and the colorful river houses in the background. Put together, it’s difficult to know where to look.

That feeling is what a reader experiences when you write an article that’s trying to do too much.

And now you see what I mean

Hopefully, this very article made you experience that feeling, as well.

The focus of this article was to help people notice when they were writing articles that struggled to stay on point. Its aim is to help writers whose face is in their hands, or who are scowling at their screen and wondering, “Why isn’t my article coming together?”

The goal was to trigger that epiphany that widens the eyes with the thought, “I’m writing two different articles! I wanted to write about this, but this other thing keeps getting in the way.”

This article offered three tips for seeing the problem: Be on the lookout for prerequisite knowledge. Don’t distract the reader with details that aren’t worth the explanation. Pick a subject that can be covered in your targeted word count.

Then it used a photography analogy, using f-stops and pictures to make the lessons visual.

But was that analogy really necessary? Analogies are good, especially when they describe one thing in terms of something completely different — like explaining a writing technique in a visual way.

But was that particular analogy necessary? F-stops are a very technical term. Explaining them is quite difficult, even for people who are legitimately interested in photography.

As a writer, you need to weigh those interests. On the one hand, I weighed the value of the f-stop analogy and how it could explain, in visual terms, the task of focusing your writing on one subject. On the other hand, I weighed the time that it would take to give the reader the information they would need to understand the analogy and how it fit into the point that I had set out to make.

After weighing those interests, I opted to include the analogy. Explaining a writing problem in a visual way was important enough, in my eyes, to justify covering all of that prerequisite knowledge.

Prerequisite knowledge?

Yes, prerequisite knowledge.

What was the distraction in this article, then? What detail didn’t have to be included, at all?

That was also in the f-stop analogy. It was the detail about how the f-stop measurement impacted the amount of light that enters the camera.

Adjusting the aperture on a camera changes two things:

The amount of light, and The depth of field.

Only the depth of field mattered for the analogy. Yet I also mentioned how it impacted the amount of light that it let into the camera, which was irrelevant for my topic. Those four paragraphs beneath the image of the camera don’t just fail to move the article forward: They distracted you with details that you thought you would need to understand Subject A, but didn’t.

As for picking a feasible subject, length requirements are always the great limitation. The longer you can write, the more you can cover. On Medium, for example, a good rule of thumb is to keep things under a 10-minute read. I could have broken this article into two:

3 Ways to Notice That Your Article Has Lost Its Focus, and Keeping Your Article On Point is Like Taking a Photo

But I didn’t have to.