Focus doesn’t mean being narrow-minded
writing March 3rd. 2008, 11:43am 
Read broadly, even if the experts say you shouldn’t. You learn as much from reading outside of your chosen niche as you do reading inside that niche. But don’t just take my word for it – I’ve got an expert backstage, waiting for the right moment to make his dramatic entrance.
When authorities say focus, people get narrow
If blogging had a prime directive in the second half of this decade, many people would say that it’s the following: focus on your niche and be the best you can be. This rule also happens to be the magic formula for success in marketing, sales, and just about any interest that we pursue.
When successful bloggers like Leo Babuta and Skellie, and numerous others, are cutting back on their RSS feeds, we listen. When they tell us that they are focusing on the most relevant content where they can get the biggest value for the smallest investment of their time, it’s hard to argue that point.
Many of us would kill (or at least mug someone) for their subscriber numbers, their daily page views, and all the other goodies that come from being recognized as leading bloggers in their areas of interest. These indicators of authority (see this ongoing series of articles about authority) give the thoughts of Leo and Skellie “baked in” persuasive ability.
If nothing else, Leo and Skellie are just trying to make efficient use of their time while simplifying their waking hours. I get that.
Nonetheless, I’m going to argue the point.
Why reading narrowly is dangerous
I think there is a danger in too much focus, too much precision and too much narrowing of scope, particularly when you are looking for source material and inspiration. I think that a writer needs to look both inside and outside of their niche for education, inspiration, and enjoyment.
If you stay inside your niche, you’re going to tend to read the same people over and over. People in niches tend to repeat common topics and themes throughout their writings because, well, niches are limiting by definition.
After awhile, things start to sound the same within a niche. Dare I use the word stale?
Just as inbreeding can lead to genetic defects (please don’t read too much into that phrase!), staying within a common pool of thought and ideas tends to screen out helpful diversity which stimulates different thoughts.
Creativity.
Innovation.
Don’t just take my word for it, take his!
There’s a guy who writes a lot. His books are best-sellers. Some of his writings have been adapted to television and film. At least one major work is the inspiration for a comic book series.
You might have heard of him. His name is Stephen King.
He wrote an interesting little book called On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Oh, and a few other books like: Carrie; The Shining; It; The Stand; Misery; and a little series called The Dark Tower.
There are a couple of interesting concepts from On Writing that lend themselves to my point:
1. Good stories come from the juxtaposition of ideas
King writes about how he got the idea for Carrie when he was thinking about two different concepts:
- The first concept was adolescent cruelty, particularly how young girls could be cruel to the ugly duckling or physically immature girl.
- The second was how certain supernatural phenomena might be explained as manifestations of telekinetic power, which is the theoretical ability for people to move objects through their thoughts.
Somehow, his mind connected these two things by seeing telekinetic power as a way for the ugly duckling to strike back at her antagonistic peers and POW: a writing career got a major shot in the arm.
My point here is that King took two different trains of thought and combined them to make something different. In my own way, I tried to do something similar with a few posts that I wrote recently where I mixed the concepts behind a superhero’s powers with the flexibility of the blogging platform.
My posts weren’t in the class of King’s novels, but I did create something different and (hopefully) interesting by mixing comic book ideas with social media and blogging tools. I couldn’t have done that if my reading was focused solely on one field or the other.
2. Good writers are voracious readers
King summarizes the second point with the following sentence:
“Write a lot and read a lot.”
To make his point, he includes a list of the books that he read during a four year period while writing four of his own books. His list includes a mixture of novels from different decades and genres, including classics like To Kill A Mockingbird and newer hits like the first three Harry Potter books.
I’m certain that he devoured an even greater quantity of newspapers, magazines, and non-fiction books at the same time.
All of that information doesn’t just sit in a brain, static and neglected. King says the following about the list of novels that he read:
“In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote.”
So what’s the point of all of this?
I don’t recommend narrowing focus in your reading and research, especially if you want to be an interesting and entertaining writer. If you’re going to focus anything, focus your output.
There’s a lot of wisdom behind the concept of niche blogging. After all, our brains are funnels and filters which take in information and spew it out in a way that we believe will make sense to other people.
Over time, we do make more informed choices about what to read and where to look for inspiration and thus we do get better on focusing on valuable content. All I’m suggesting, however, is that you should look for good content both inside and outside of your niche.
As King suggests, the juxtaposition of different ideas, which comes from broad and varied reading, can yield great results.
Look outside your niche; you never know where you’ll find the inspiration for YOUR next great post.
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