Motivate people to care
You need to draw people in if you are to achieve your purpose for writing
What is the purpose of what you write? You might write a prayer letter inspiring people to pray. Or an update on your ministry on a social media site, encouraging people to give. Or perhaps you write non-fiction articles or books for publication. Whatever you write, you want people to care. Even fiction writers want people to care—I’ve stopped reading more than a couple of fiction books because the author hadn’t drawn me into caring about the characters.
So, ask: Why should anyone care about what I’m writing? It’s a confronting question. I can ask it now: Why should Japan Harvest readers care about this little column that I’m writing? My first answer is that they want to write well. But why? Because they want to communicate their thoughts clearly—to communicate what they are passionate about. Or through their writing they want to motivate people to act: to pray, to give, or to get more involved in mission. Or they want to write a book that they feel God is compelling them to write.
One way to encourage people to care is to tap into the things that people are already concerned about. For example, in a prayer letter, people who have been supporting you for a long time will probably be interested in how their support has made a difference to your life and ministry.
Or you could make a connection between their lives and your own by introducing a report of your ministry: “The other day I went to the store to buy some milk [something readers can connect to], and while I was there I saw a middle-aged woman who’s come to our church a few times.”
Telling stories is another way. People are more likely to respond to a story about a single seeker that you know, than a list of statistics about how unreached Japan is.
Emotions also make an idea more memorable. Eighteen years ago, on our first home assignment, I told emotional stories that people still remember. Think carefully about how you can use emotion (not just happy and sad) to inspire your readers to care about what you’ve written.
Emotion transforms ideas from being abstract or analytical into something that readers feel and will stick in their minds long after they’ve finished reading.
If your writing propels people to care, it will propel them to act.