Writers, Don’t Drive Home the Point

You’re the driver. But you’re not alone on the journey.

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“Drive home the point”— we, writers, are all too familiar with the catchy phrase. With every story, we know what we need to do: Get the message across. Make our case. Justify the Big Idea.

As storytellers, we believe in the beauty of ideas, and more so when they’re our ideas. As honorable as this is, the truth is that our passion sometimes renders us vulnerable. We over-describe. We put intricacies here and there. We express the same thought repeatedly— rephrased in three different ways — throughout our stories. For a short while, we lose the ability to remove ourselves from our work. And we confuse emotions with emotional value.

So perhaps we could benefit from a little tweaking.

They say, “Drive home the point”.

I say, “Drive home the reader”.

At one point, we all settle on what we want to say. We eventually get that chaotic thing out of our heads and onto the page (where they, admittedly, often look even more in shambles).

We have the vehicle — a body of words to sit on. And we, writers, have the awesome privilege to drive it.

Can you imagine it now? There you are, sitting in your classic Ford Mustang GT. Hall &…