Finding Focus

Focus is something that often eludes me. I sit down to write a story with good intentions but then I become distracted by a bird outside the window (it is a magpie perched on the yew tree) or a sound I can hear (there is a man delivering something for next door) or a Twitter notification (someone has liked my post about the magpie on the yew tree). Our lives are busy and chaotic, and even those among us who are good at finding focus won’t necessarily always have the perfect environment for maintaining focus long enough to craft an entire story.

And when our minds lose focus, there is often a danger that our writing loses focus as well. Rather than a story being about one specific thing (the distillation of a single idea), its focus becomes split, we try to put in too much, we lose a clear sense of narrative or emotional journey. When I’m critiquing work for other writers, this is a question I ask more times than anything else—have you quite found the focus of this piece? And since this idea of focus is so important, I thought it would be a worthy topic for my ramblings this month.

Narrative Focus

For me, any piece of writing (whether it’s a flash fiction, a short story, or a novel chapter) should have a sense of cohesion to the story it is telling. If you were going to sum things up in a single sentence, what would it be? One piece of advice that I often give is to write a WHEN-THEN synopsis. For example, “When Wittgenstein returns from the war, he struggles to recapture his sense of joy.” This is a synopsis I wrote for my story Wittgenstein Sits at the Piano… (Reflex Fiction) which in its original iteration lacked that sense of focus. In the first version, there was all sorts of detail about Wittgenstein’s family and his life before the war, but they were irrelevant to that core story, and in the end they had to go. The reason I suggest WHEN-THEN synopses is that they require a writer to think about:

1. Change: the return from war.

2. Motivation: Wittgenstein wants to recapture his sense of joy, but he isn’t sure how / isn’t sure he is capable of it.

3. Tension: his inner turmoil, the past vs the present.

4. Starting point: what is the moment things change? This story doesn’t need an explanation of what Wittgenstein had for breakfast.

5. End point: what is the moment to step away from the page? Here, I wanted to leave a reader with a sense of hope.

In terms of narrative, writing a WHEN-THEN synopsis can get us asking multiple questions about our story and help us in distilling it down to its purest essence. Of course, not all stories will fit within this framework, but many can be effectively encapsulated in these terms. Why not have a go for yourself? What WHEN-THEN synopsis might you write for the following story?

Elvis is alive and he lives in Belfast (Letty Butler | New Writers)

Why not pick one of your own story drafts and write a synopsis that aims to sum up the narrative in this way? Once you’ve done that, ask yourself whether everything within the story is relevant to that particular arc; ask yourself whether anything is missing (like a sense of change or a sense of motivation); ask yourself whether the story starts and ends in the right place.

Other Levels of Focus

Of course, narrative isn’t the be-all and end-all of writing fiction. We’ve also got characters to consider as well as structure, pacing, passage of time, language, emotional journey and theme—and each of those elements requires a focus of its own.

When thinking about character, not everything needs to make it onto the page. Wittgenstein was a Scorpio, but that would have been an irrelevant thing to include in this particular story. In an early version, I had him thinking about apple strudel, but that was a detail that ended up on the chopping room floor because it didn’t necessarily connect with a story about war, injury and playing the piano.

When thinking about any other element, we can do similar. The passage of time in this piece focuses on a single scene with Wittgenstein sitting at the piano, flecks of backstory peppered in. If the story suddenly jumped to two days later that would almost certainly rob it of the temporal focus it has hopefully achieved. With language, what are the words or phrases that bring this particular story to life—what words fit the tone or time period? How does the language reflect the way a character sees the world?

I tend to shy away from sharing my own stories in these newsletters mainly because there are much more effective storytellers out there, but I’ve made an exception today because choosing my own stories gives me the advantage of knowing the writer’s intention (rather than just guessing), so I’ll shift the focus here onto another of my pieces, Black Annis (New Flash Fiction Review), for which I wrote the following in order to find a sense of focus:

• Narrative: This is a story about a woman who is hunted to death because of being different / the lies people tell.

• Time: It unfolds over the course of a lifetime with each paragraph jumping backwards in time from Annis’s death towards her childhood.

• Character: Annis is a resilient woman who has been hurt by the world and therefore keeps her distance. She is defined by her relationship to both people and nature.

• Imagery / tone: There should be a strong connection to the natural world; the time period is historical (medieval?)

• Theme / hidden truth: The reader is asked to ponder the question “what is the truth?” A proverb lying beneath the story might be “careless talk costs lives.”

When I wrote these details down and really made myself consider them, I realised that some of the narrative had to go (it didn’t fit in with that central idea), some of the character details I’d put on the page muddied the waters of who I needed Annis to be in this 500-word story, some of the language didn’t fit the overall tone, there wasn’t really a hidden truth or a secondary layer to the story (as hopefully there is in the finished version).

Again, why not have a go at this with one of your stories? Really consider those core questions of what, when, who, how and why, and try to be as concrete as possible. If it feels as though you are crowbarring a watering can into a plant pot then there is maybe something essential that needs tweaking.

Final Thoughts

What I’ve written above oversimplifies things quite a bit. Each story is different and requires its own treatment. Trying to fit stories into boxes is something I spend a lot of time pushing against, but I think what we are doing in looking for focus is distilling our writing into its purest essence. Some readers will perhaps think that this distillation into a single idea only applies for the tiniest of stories, but I would argue that even for an epic novel, we should be able to sum up what it is about without running out of breath. Perhaps the simplest of templates is “this is a story about X” where X might be focused either on narrative (“this is a story about a family who come together to search for their missing father during a heatwave”) or character (“this is a story about a woman who won’t let the bastards grind her down”) or theme (“this is a story about what it is to be human”). In mapping each of these things on top of each other, we start to create layers. And if we want our stories to be in crystal-clear focus then we don’t just focus on the overall, but we focus in on each scene, each paragraph, each sentence, constantly asking ourselves what, who, when, how and why until we arrive at that sense of focus in its purest, most distilled form.

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