The legendary management-consulting guru Stephen Covey was fond of saying, “The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.”

I don’t know if Covey was ever referring to writing—he did plenty of that as a bestselling author—but his point certainly applied. That’s because staying on message challenges writers from start to finish.

One reason it’s so hard is that when you elaborate a message, or concept, you illustrate with examples and stories and data. Invariably, this amazing content begins to drive your concept, not the other way around.

It’s the old tail-wagging-the-dog problem. You get tempted into making all kind of points that are not the main point. You digress or detour, and even though you know that getting off message is risky, you plunge ahead with gathering momentum.

Say you’re writing about how to find purpose in life. You tell the story about a woman hiking from monastery to monastery in Bhutan, seeking her personal truth. Without meaning to, you start to write about the woman finding great art along her way, and writing about how the art reflects the people of the Himalaya.

The passage you’re writing, though aimed at illustrating purpose, twists. Following this tangential course seems both relevant and irresistible while you’re writing. Only later, during editing, do you see you hopped to a new thread that goes crosswise to your intended direction, and as you continued to write, you started to get lost.

A key tool for staying on message is embedded in your word processor. It is “outline format.” Many authors use outlines, but they don’t use outliners. That’s too bad, because an outline for a book runs many pages. It can have so many tiers that the connection to the main message gets obscured by all the sub-messages. The trees obscure the forest that is “the main thing.”

But with the outliner in your word processor, you can toggle from the line items on the ground to the main point that runs through your book. The outliner is like a Google Maps for writers. You click to the high-level view to see the landscape, and then click on the little man to get the street view. The beauty of it is that you stay oriented on both levels at the same time.

To be sure, losing control of your writing can happen in many ways, and you have to fight to stay on track. But outline software—it’s right there on your computer!—can give you an assist with overcoming this forest-and-trees problem. Invest in learning the basics, and you’ll get a big return—keeping the main thing the main thing.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published November 10, 2014]