Does Your Writing Stick?

Posted by Lynne Klippel on July 22, 2009

While traveling, I read an outstanding novel by Jodi Picoult called Harvesting the Heart. In the book, a young wife from a troubled background suffers postpartum depression and runs away from her husband and infant son for three months. When she returns, her angry husband refuses to accept her back into the family.

The women buys a sleeping bag and camps out on the front lawn, sleeping under a hydrangea bush.

I could not get that image out of my mind. For some reason, the fact that it was a hydrangea bush made the picture hauntingly clear in my imagination.

If you read novels, and every writer should, you will notice that great writers don’t describe everything in a scene but share a few crystal clear details that anchor the story in your mind. In this book, the hydrangea bush was the anchor detail. The color of the sleeping bag, the face of the wife, even the appearance for the house was left to the reader’s imagination. By identifying the hydrangea bush, the author made the scene believable but did not bore or distract the reader with too much extraneous description.

Non fiction writers must do this as well. Best selling non fiction authors use this same anchoring technique in the stories they tell to illustrate key points.

As you write your book, pay close attention to the stories you tell. Notice how much description you use. Cut out everything that is unimportant.

Anchor each story with one striking detail. When your book is crisp, clear and engaging, people relish the experience of reading it as much as they enjoy the information presented.

That’s the recipe for a successful book in any topic area.