One degree off course doesn’t sound like much. But if you’re on a spaceship headed for the moon, you’ll miss your target by more than four thousand miles.
You won’t lose yourself in deep space if your writing wanders off topic, but you may well lose your readers. And it’s easy to wander. Your active mind is thinking of examples and anecdotes, of connections between what you’re writing about and other subjects, of something that, oops, you forgot to mention in a previous chapter or section, so why not put it here. You know exactly how all the pieces fit together; your logic is as clear to you as the cloudless morn.
But not necessarily to your reader.
Your reader isn’t you. He’s not inside your head; she doesn’t see what you see. And bunny trails that make perfect sense to you are liable to confuse him or her if you’re not careful. Not that you must plug doggedly along on the straight-and-narrow without any creative digressions–how boring!–but your writing has to be coherent. Your ideas must connect plainly. So when you share an anecdote or explore some insight on the side, make sure your reader understands what you’re doing and how it relates to your main topic. Here are three tips to help.
Stay True to Your Chapter Titles
You give your chapters their titles for a reason: to tell the reader what the overarching topic is that each chapter will cover. So for every chapter, keep its theme in mind. It should be your polestar, your compass. Don’t deviate from it. Rather, make sure that everything you write contributes to the chapter’s main topic–not just in your own mind but in a way that will be clear to your readers.
Use Subheads to Organize
How will a chapter progress? How will you break it into smaller units that flow logically from one to the next? Will you tell a story? Use examples?
Questions such as these can help you shape each chapter in your mind. But don’t just think your chapters through–outline them in print. That is, write them out. Doing so will suggest subheads for organizing your content. Then when you write your actual content, stay true–as with your chapter titles–to the topic each subhead tells readers it will address.
Chasing the butterfly of spontaneity is fun, but it can lead you far afield if you’re not careful, and too many butterflies flitting hither and yon will make your readers wonder what your main point is or what any of your points are. So stay accountable to your subheads. You can change them if you need to–you’re not married to them. But they make a good tether.
Alert Your Readers to Sudden Changes
You’re forging ahead with your narrative but then decide to revisit some event in your past. Make sure you signal that transition to your reader. Otherwise, when you suddenly leap from the present back to the year 2002, that person will still have both feet planted in the time where you left him. And that, my friend, is extremely disorienting, like stepping out your front door and finding yourself in Oz. What the heck just happened?
You’ve got to help your reader make the leap with you.
I’ve used the example of a shift in time, but the same concern applies to any abrupt change–in setting, in subject, in anything that can confuse readers unless you prepare them by using a transitional or a connecting device. That device could be a single word, a phrase, or a sentence (however, nevertheless, in short, three years ago, afterward, therefore, to summarize, when I was ten years old . . . ). It could be a subhead or a text break. You could set ancillary content in sidebars that don’t interrupt the main narrative. There are all kinds of possibilities, but there’s just one goal: to keep your readers tracking easily with you in time and circumstance.