What I am going to tell you here will be obvious to some readers, but to others, perhaps not. There are two objectives that any piece of writing has, only two, and this is true for either fiction or non-fiction.

All writing exists either to:

1. Educate (self or others); and/or,

2. Entertain (self or others).

That’s it. That is the bottom line. You can think about any piece of writing from the cave paintings in Lascaux France to the operators manual for the Superconducting Supercollider, and they were all written to educate or entertain. My view is that if the writing does both then it is better.

So what has this got to do with keeping the end in mind? What I mean is, have a clear objective when you start writing something, whether that objective is written down or just in your mind. A clear objective, a destination, saves time and makes your writing better. Let me give you an example from my own work.

One of the things I do as a freelance writer is craft regular features for a website devoted to United States soccer. The site covers Major League Soccer (MLS), the United Soccer League (USL), and Women’s professional Soccer (WPS).

Now the owners of that website are in business, and to make the site interesting and useful enough for consumers to go there and keep coming back they need good content. In other words, there needs to be something useful and interesting that the site provides, ergo: It needs to educate and entertain.

See where I am going with this? So, when I sit down to craft an article for www.soccerhype.com, I go through the following process:

1. What is it that my readers need to know today? What do they care about?

Okay, the MLS playoffs are about to start, that’s what I will write about.

2. What do they need to know about the playoffs?

Hmmm, well, they need to know who is playing who and when the games are… I will put that in.

3. Besides the essential facts, what can I tell them that they don’t know? What would be interesting or entertaining?

How about if I tell them why each game will be good… how the teams got where they are and what to look for in each game.

Okay, with that in mind I am ready to start pulling the facts I need to relay, like teams playing each other, times and so forth – Educate. Then, I seek to answer the more esoteric questions in an interesting or humorous way – Entertain.

Got it, it is as simple as that. If you can find something the reader doesn’t know already, or an interesting viewpoint that gets him or her thinking, then you have done the job. And while my example is about doing a non-fiction piece, the same basic rules apply to fiction. You want to educate or entertain the reader and take them places they have not already gone. I will write more on how to apply this to fiction in another post.