Writing for a wider audience

Almost all the writing I have done in my life has been of a technical or academic nature.  When I worked in the commercial world, I had to be careful to keep my writing accurate and to the point, but to quickly engage the reader.  When I moved into the academic world, I had to learn how to write in a new way, pretty much from scratch.  

You will know what I mean by this.  Ensuring that I engage with a sometimes wide historiography, making sure that every use of someone else’s work is properly designated as such and is accurately cited, explaining how I know certain things to be ‘true’.   My writing became drained of the elements I used to be proud of, such as what passes for my sense of humour and the ability to conjure up from a set of conceptual ideas what they might mean for a reader.

I am writing something different at the moment, which is a cross-over history book aimed at the sort of history geek who is always found furtling around the history section at Waterstone’s.  (i.e. me about ten years ago).   I am trying to write something that is serious and has a thesis but which can be appreciated without a literature review and footnotes.  It is a sort of coffee table book where I discuss fifty photos from modern London in the 1930s.  For each photo I am writing about 450 words, so with an introduction, about 25,000 to 30,000 words.  

The good news is that by removing the strictures of academic convention, I can get the narrative and the idea over to the reader very quickly, so that they can see why I found a particular photo intriguing and why it tells us something important about the history of the 1930s.   This has made my writing much more immediate and accessible (I think).  The bad news is that this format makes building up a sustained argument difficult, as complex ideas are rendered in plainer tones than they really require.  I am attempting to solve this by building up the case, picture by picture.  I will be reliant on Maddy Hatfield, my editor at Yellowback,  to kick me around enough to make sure that I get there.  At the moment, because I am treating my first drafts independently for each picture I am repeating my ideas a little, and that will all need to go.  

On balance, I like writing for a wider audience.  It is good to get to the point inside a few paragraphs.  It feels more like journalism than academic writing but that is OK with me for the time being.  I also feel like I am learning a new skill and that is a good feeling at my, or anybody else’s, age.