While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all professional writers...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see! Hemingway’s quote above will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output and sales.
Sir Francis Bacon said, “Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.” That’s an ideal I set before myself when I write articles.
As you can tell by the 1682 posts I’ve made here since June of 2007 – fourteen years ago, I ENJOY writing articles. In addition to the ones below, I’ve had articles published in the local newspaper, the Brooklyn Center SUNPOST and the STARTRIBUNE, the major newspaper in Minneapolis, MN.
I LIKE writing articles! I’ve been paid for my work – for both my opinion and for passing my research on. The main venue for passing on research has been tracking the journey of my wife and I through breast cancer, and more recently my own journey with my dad through Alzheimer’s (https://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/)
But as a fiction writer, how could I possibly manage writing about REAL things? How could I manage movie reviews? Interviews? What went right for me writing articles?
Writing articles drew on two of my deepest personality traits: expressing my opinion and research. I love both and I’m pretty sure it would be impossible to write an article if you didn’t have both.
Of COURSE I’ve done pure opinion pieces, ones that require no research at all and are, ultimately, “all about ME!”. I’ve done them for both the local newspaper, the SunPost; and one of the two main newspapers of Minnesota, the StarTribune. Even so, my real strength is one that also gave me a career that lasted over thirty years, bracketed by behavior I’ve entertained since then and started (clearly) when I was about sixteen. (LITTLE BIT Magazine, an article about high school teenagers in 1973 getting haircuts for a production of Rogers & Hammerstein's "South Pacific").
The desire to explain thing is so much a part of me, that virtually everything I write has this component. The samples of my work below show that I like to both understand and explain stuff. With over 1100 hits, my article on mosquito bites and how they affect the lymphedema of recovering breast cancer patients is one of the most popular I’ve ever written (which also means it’s something that gets “Googled” quite often.) They illustrate just a few of the ways I’ve used that skill to pass onto others things that I know, or understand, or THINK I understand.
Thee are steps I subconsciously follow that I’ve never really thought about until now. They might even match your own experience, but they’ve worked for me for a long time.
1) Know what you want someone to understand. From movie to book reviews, to explaining how esoteric cancer treatment drugs work, you need to have a very specific goal in mind. Even in opinion pieces or letters to the editor, your GOAL should be clearly expressed either right away, or summarized succinctly at the end.
2) Have sources. Unless your article is purely opinion (if it doesn’t have some basis in fact, I’d call it a “rant” rather than an article. Rants are fine, but tend to be read by people who already hold the same opinion you do, so the end result is that you’re just getting an echo of your own voice. If you’re doing ARTICLE, you need sources, preferably as close to the original event or research as possible.
3) Once you have your sources, lay out your intended message along with quotes from sources outside your personal echo chamber.* You can use opposing opinions to make sure you’re open-minded and practice debating ephemeral words. If you’re doing what I called “translating the doctors” on my GUY’S GOTTA TALK ABOUT…, then you need sources to help you explain complex procedures. (With a BS in Biology, I have a reasonable background to understand original sources such as journal articles). For a Writing To Get Published class I’ve taught for the past 25 years to gifted kids during a week-long, all-day, seminar, I’ve now been published professionally enough times to be able to have some credibility (see the list to the right of this article). I can also explain in plain English how breast implants are inserted and anchored; and confirm the typical stages of decline in Alzheimer’s Disease as I watched my father slip away.
4) Explain the procedure or process so clearly that your reader can visualize it and understand or replicate it.
5) Talk about successes – not to promise results, but to give examples of how the application of your methodologies or beliefs or actions produce results outside of your echo chamber. Also, use successes very sparingly. Patting yourself on the back too hard can make you look stuck up or it can depress others who might feel they can never measure up to you.
6) Last of all, you can’t be afraid. If you aren’t bold enough to put possibly irritating ideas “out there”, why would people want to read your work? Everybody likes a little spice in their life. Even Jan Karon, whose novels of pastoral gentleness, occasionally uses mild spice to drive her narratives!
*[Definition of “echo chamber”: (Wikipedia, though they’re hardly ones to come up with an unbiased definition!) “In discussions of news media, an echo chamber refers to situations in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.”
A selection of articles I’ve written and were published (NOT on my own blog…):
THE WRITER (Yeah, THAT one…)
http://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/2015/01/writing-advice-matter-of-time.html
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY WRITERS OF AMERICA BLOG
https://www.sfwa.org/2012/07/11/guest-post-when-did-science-fiction-and-apocalypse-become-interchangeable/
THE WORKING WRITER
http://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/2020/11/ideas-for-how-to-teach-writing-class.html
STUPEFYING STORIES BLOG
http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2020/11/writing-as-newborn-9th-gendered.html
http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2018/06/talking-shop_27.html
http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2021/02/michael-shaara-wishing-for-killer.html
http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2021/01/movie-review-wandering-earth.html
GUY’S GOTTA TALK ABOUT…
https://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/07/lymph-node-excision-mosquito-bites-and.html
Image: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/22/3b/9f223b1e57a36e14db3eb13715fbe3f9.jpg
But as a fiction writer, how could I possibly manage writing about REAL things? How could I manage movie reviews? Interviews? What went right for me writing articles?
Writing articles drew on two of my deepest personality traits: expressing my opinion and research. I love both and I’m pretty sure it would be impossible to write an article if you didn’t have both.
Of COURSE I’ve done pure opinion pieces, ones that require no research at all and are, ultimately, “all about ME!”. I’ve done them for both the local newspaper, the SunPost; and one of the two main newspapers of Minnesota, the StarTribune. Even so, my real strength is one that also gave me a career that lasted over thirty years, bracketed by behavior I’ve entertained since then and started (clearly) when I was about sixteen. (LITTLE BIT Magazine, an article about high school teenagers in 1973 getting haircuts for a production of Rogers & Hammerstein's "South Pacific").
The desire to explain thing is so much a part of me, that virtually everything I write has this component. The samples of my work below show that I like to both understand and explain stuff. With over 1100 hits, my article on mosquito bites and how they affect the lymphedema of recovering breast cancer patients is one of the most popular I’ve ever written (which also means it’s something that gets “Googled” quite often.) They illustrate just a few of the ways I’ve used that skill to pass onto others things that I know, or understand, or THINK I understand.
Thee are steps I subconsciously follow that I’ve never really thought about until now. They might even match your own experience, but they’ve worked for me for a long time.
1) Know what you want someone to understand. From movie to book reviews, to explaining how esoteric cancer treatment drugs work, you need to have a very specific goal in mind. Even in opinion pieces or letters to the editor, your GOAL should be clearly expressed either right away, or summarized succinctly at the end.
2) Have sources. Unless your article is purely opinion (if it doesn’t have some basis in fact, I’d call it a “rant” rather than an article. Rants are fine, but tend to be read by people who already hold the same opinion you do, so the end result is that you’re just getting an echo of your own voice. If you’re doing ARTICLE, you need sources, preferably as close to the original event or research as possible.
3) Once you have your sources, lay out your intended message along with quotes from sources outside your personal echo chamber.* You can use opposing opinions to make sure you’re open-minded and practice debating ephemeral words. If you’re doing what I called “translating the doctors” on my GUY’S GOTTA TALK ABOUT…, then you need sources to help you explain complex procedures. (With a BS in Biology, I have a reasonable background to understand original sources such as journal articles). For a Writing To Get Published class I’ve taught for the past 25 years to gifted kids during a week-long, all-day, seminar, I’ve now been published professionally enough times to be able to have some credibility (see the list to the right of this article). I can also explain in plain English how breast implants are inserted and anchored; and confirm the typical stages of decline in Alzheimer’s Disease as I watched my father slip away.
4) Explain the procedure or process so clearly that your reader can visualize it and understand or replicate it.
5) Talk about successes – not to promise results, but to give examples of how the application of your methodologies or beliefs or actions produce results outside of your echo chamber. Also, use successes very sparingly. Patting yourself on the back too hard can make you look stuck up or it can depress others who might feel they can never measure up to you.
6) Last of all, you can’t be afraid. If you aren’t bold enough to put possibly irritating ideas “out there”, why would people want to read your work? Everybody likes a little spice in their life. Even Jan Karon, whose novels of pastoral gentleness, occasionally uses mild spice to drive her narratives!
*[Definition of “echo chamber”: (Wikipedia, though they’re hardly ones to come up with an unbiased definition!) “In discussions of news media, an echo chamber refers to situations in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.”
A selection of articles I’ve written and were published (NOT on my own blog…):
THE WRITER (Yeah, THAT one…)
http://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/2015/01/writing-advice-matter-of-time.html
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY WRITERS OF AMERICA BLOG
https://www.sfwa.org/2012/07/11/guest-post-when-did-science-fiction-and-apocalypse-become-interchangeable/
THE WORKING WRITER
http://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/2020/11/ideas-for-how-to-teach-writing-class.html
STUPEFYING STORIES BLOG
http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2020/11/writing-as-newborn-9th-gendered.html
http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2018/06/talking-shop_27.html
http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2021/02/michael-shaara-wishing-for-killer.html
http://stupefyingstories.blogspot.com/2021/01/movie-review-wandering-earth.html
GUY’S GOTTA TALK ABOUT…
https://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/07/lymph-node-excision-mosquito-bites-and.html
Image: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/22/3b/9f223b1e57a36e14db3eb13715fbe3f9.jpg
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