Perfect Plotting for a Great Post

Your road map to writing compelling short reads

When writers think “plot,” we often think of longer works: movies, novels. But the same things that make a book “unputdownable” or a movie utterly irresistible can help your posts, articles, and essays, too. They can keep your readers intrigued as they read and keep them coming back for more of your work.

I mined my expertise in editing and in teaching writing for five tips that’ll improve any post’s readability. They don’t all have to be used all at once, but you’ll find they work well in tandem.

Keep an end goal in mind

You sat down to write a post because you had something to say. That’s terrific! (You should celebrate every single time you come up with an idea, by the way.) But if you’re anything like me, you have a million other things rattling around in your brainpan, and you might get a little lost when you actually get to the writing part. So keep your eyes on the prize. Remember the point you were trying to make in the first place.

Case study: When I began writing this post, I went veering down the road of how mountain biking is like writing, because I came up with this idea for better plotting in posts while I was out on my mountain bike. Don’t do that. Keep your eyes on the prize. Write it down and stick it to your monitor if you have to, or even type it out at the top of the document you’re working on.

That way, it’ll be like a guiding star for you, always reminding you of its existence.

Maintain clear points of view

A good post will feel cohesive. Keeping everything moving toward a goal is part of this, but a clear point of view is the other part of the equation. In many posts, the point of view is likely yours, and that’s a good thing. Keeping the attention focused on your own experience and expertise is a good way to hang on to your reader’s attention.

If you’re writing about someone else, that’s great! Even here, you can find a way to connect yourself to the person you’re writing about, like Amy Shearn does in this interview with Susan Orlean. This personal approach does double duty. One, it holds the reader’s attention; two, it gives off the impression of vulnerability, which helps to forge an additional connection with your reader.

Ratchet up the tension

In traditional story formats, the action and tension builds until it all reaches a climax, at which point everything blows up and then gets resolved.

In posts, it’s much the same. I leaned on this technique for a post I wrote recently about my adventure with a new-to-me budgeting system. I kept on upping the stakes over the body of the post. In the first section, it’s just about my trying to conquer my fear of money. A little later, it’s about saving for my future. And finally, the post addresses the emotional payoff of using the budgeting system, which ended up being the most important thing about the post.

In Laura Khoudari’s recent short post about writing haiku to find calm, she uses a similar structure, as she details how her haiku became broader in scope and weightier as she understood more about how they work for her.

You can do the same. Think about how you might keep the action up in your posts, and how you might up the ante.

Character arcs apply here too

This one’s pretty self-explanatory: Folks like to read about changes. I imagine it this way. If I’m writing about myself and I’ve started the post as one kind of person, I like to explore some change by the end of the post. In my essay on Bruce Springsteen, for instance, I started as a young girl whose classmates attacked her immigrant status by playing “Born in the U.S.A.” on a boombox. By the end of it, in my current state, I had recast what that song means to me.

In Emily Kingsley’s remarkable essay about stealing leeches from a medical facility (yes, really), she starts out as a woman wanting only to help save her husband’s severed finger. By the end, her scope has broadened considerably.

You don’t have to have experienced some kind of internal trauma to use this technique. In a post, you might have just experienced something new you want to share with the world, like Ryan Holiday’s done in his great post on the humble index card, or Kaki Okumura’s post on how Japanese people stay fit. In these posts, too, even though the writers are already experts on a thing or are just informing their readers of something, you get the sense that they’ve changed through the telling of their experience.

Nail the ending

Everyone loves a good happily ever after! Here, we’re expanding our definition of that. For the purposes of an effective post, we want an ending that keeps your readers thinking, or that encourages them to share. What does this mean for the writer? You can make sure there’s a takeaway, like a good set of tips, as in this post. You can end with a specific call to engage, like asking a question or encouraging your readers to leave a thoughtful comment, as suggested by Samantha Zabell in this post. I love writing personal essays, and while endings in that genre can be really hard to nail down, it’s surprisingly helpful to consider it from the reader’s side of the desk: What will they get out of it?

The other side of the coin is just as important: What do you want them to get out of it?

No post draft is going to be perfect, but borrowing from other genres can help us to become better writers. And practicing good technique on our shorter, more frequent works might just inform the work we do on our longer works. If you try any of these, let me know how you did in the comments.

Yi Shun Lai (say “yeeshun” for her first name; “lie” for her last) is the author of Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu and Pin Ups, a memoir. Her column on writing and publishing, “From the Front Lines,” runs every month at The Writer magazine. She teaches inclusion workshops for creatives at CanIPlayThat.com