 Your Guide to a Successful Writing Career
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Focus, Unity and Flow by Dawn Copeman
What is focus?. Focus is what makes your article unique. It is what makes it readable, enjoyable and worth publishing. Focus also takes work. Focus involves looking closely at exactly what it is you want to write about and making sure you write only about that aspect of your topic. This can be harder than it sounds, especially if you've done a lot of research on your topic before deciding on the angle it would take: it can be difficult to leave a lot of that research out. Similarly, if you've interviewed someone in connection with your piece, it can be hard to discard some of those hard-earned quotes when you realise they don't actually fit in with the focus you've decided to take. But you must be ruthless when you are constructing your article and put in only those elements that fit within your focus. How to find your focus. First, choose your topic. For this example I'll use one I've written about before: food allergies. Now this is an exciting topic, one that is evergreen -- that means it can be used at all times throughout the year -- and a topic that affects a growing number of the population. So, it should be quite easy to write an article about it? Well, yes and no. For a start, this topic is too broad. As Moira Allen puts it in her excellent book, How to Write for Magazines, you need to 'zoom in' to find the focus. There are six ways of finding the focus of your piece:
So, for this topic our focus could be any of the following:
Stay focused. When you've found your focus, stick to it. Ruthlessly discard anything that doesn't fit the focus. Read your first finished draft carefully. Does it stick to the focus? Does it deliver what it promised to do? Does it go off on a tangent anywhere? If it does, then take that bit out and start again. If, for example, you've chosen to write an article on food allergies in adults, you shouldn't put in anything about food allergies in children or teenagers, because they don't belong in that focus. Going off focus to introduce an interesting (to you) fact would be jarring to the reader. The flow of the piece would have been lost and your reader will become disconnected with your piece. Remember, you can always use your research to produce another article on this topic with a different focus. Last year, for example, I was asked to write an article about Teatime in Britain for TimeTravel-Britain.com. In the course of my research I found out lots of facts about tea: tea history; types of tea; the history of the major tearooms in Britain; tea dances: when they began, what they were, where you can do them today; and the major British tea manufacturers. I 'zoomed out,' to borrow another of Moira's terms, to find out all I could about tea and teatime in Britain. Then when I'd done my research I had to 'zoom in' again to find the focus of my piece. My focus was the traditions of teatime in Britain. I used all the facts that were relevant to that focus and filed the rest away for potential use another day. No research is ever wasted; it's just another article waiting to be written. But don't make the mistake of trying to cram all your research into one article; it won't work and it won't sell.
Once you've chosen a structure and settled upon the focus of your piece, it's important to make sure that you follow through with unity and flow. Unity means making sure that everything you write down contributes to the article and that nothing you have written detracts from the flow. An article has flow when the reader can read through your article from beginning to end as smoothly as possible, without ever having to stop to reread a paragraph or get something straight in her mind. An article with flow and unity is read to the end. Without it, your reader will give up and read something else instead. So how do we achieve this? Well, it's best to start with unity. Unity In its simplest form, unity means that everything you put into your article contributes to the point you are making and does not go off on some interesting but unrelated tangent. If you have worked out the focus of your piece, then keeping the unity of the article should be easy. To check the unity of your article, ensure you keep in mind these two simple commands:
Leave Out Unnecessary Facts: Let's take our article about the cancer charity marathon runner Elise Margoldt. The focus of this piece is her run for charity and why she did it. If I were to suddenly go off and talk about the fact that she has also now left her job at the DMV and set up her own scrapbooking business, then I would be off focus and the article would not have unity. The readers would be wondering why I'd put that in. They might wonder whether I was implying that all people who recover from cancer go on to completely change their lives. Therefore, although this information is interesting, it does not fit within the focus of this piece and it must be taken out. If, however, my focus was "cancer as a force for change," then this information would be relevant to the story and would add to its unity. Unity is very closely linked to focus. Check your focus, write to your focus and you shouldn't have to chop any sections out of your first draft. Keep The Same Style Throughout: For a piece to be unified, it must have unity of tone, voice, and point of view. Is it written in the same style throughout? Does this style match the intended publication's house style? Did you start off writing in a friendly, chatty voice and then switch to a more formal one? Did you start writing in the 1st person and switch to 3rd or vice-versa? Have you used the same method of referring to people throughout? It is okay to start by referring to someone as Mrs Elise Margoldt, or Elise Margoldt and then to refer to her as Elise or Margoldt. You don't need to use the full name every time she is mentioned. What you need to watch out for, however, is unity in how you then refer to her. You cannot refer to her by her first name in one paragraph and then by her surname in a subsequent one. Once you have checked the unity of your piece, you can work on the flow. Flow When an article has flow, it is an easy, seamless read. To check the flow you need to read through your article and check the following. Does your lead work? A lead should entice the reader into the article and make them want to know more. Does yours? Take the lead out of your story. Does the story still work? If it does then your lead wasn't doing anything. Re-write it. Is your lead a red herring? Is your lead sensational and attention-grabbing but not actually relevant to your article? I could write an article on food allergies with the lead "Are You Serving Poison at Your Kid's Party?" But this would be a false lead. Food allergens are not poisons, at least not to most children. And by the time the reader has realized what the article is about, they might well feel cheated by the false promise of the lead. This isn't an article about hidden poisons, but allergies. Do your readers have to jump gaps? Read these two paragraphs:
In pagan Europe eggs were decorated in spring colours of red, yellow and green and given to friends as part of the spring festival to honour the spring goddess Eastre from whom we get the name Easter. There is a transitional gap between the first and second paragraph. These facts are related, but not that closely. The reader has to stop a second to get back on track with where the article is going. They thought they were reading about the pagan origins of Easter and suddenly they're reading about Easter Egg Hunts. Now read this version:
Easter eggs have been around a long time. The ancient Britons used to give each other brightly decorated eggs at their springtime festival called Eostre. And for thousands of years before that the ancient Egyptians liked to give and receive eggs too. This time, there are no gaps for the reader to jump. The paragraphs have been linked by the repetition of the 'eggs' theme and, as a result, the piece flows better. If you find any 'gaps' in your article, try re-arranging the paragraphs to see if that closes the gaps. If that doesn't work, re-write the paragraphs to make the transition smooth. Or try using a different article structure; you have plenty to choose from. Now, this might seem a lot of work to do for one article and it is. But once you've learned the secrets of a good article -- the structure, focus, unit and flow -- it will get easier. And when you have written an article with a good structure, focus, unity and flow, it will stand a better chance of being published. However, to really ensure your article gets read, you need to give it a powerful hook. And that's what we'll do in Part II!.
Dawn Copeman is a UK-based freelance writer and educator who has published over 300 articles on the topics of travel, cookery, history, health and writing. An experienced commercial freelancer, Dawn contributed several chapters on commercial writing to Moira Allen's Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer (2nd Edition). |
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