Writing requires research. It’s a nature of the beast and it doesn’t matter whether the work is fiction or nonfiction. Story relies on a strong foundation built from knowledge.
Sometimes we know the subject sufficiently to begin immediately. Other times we are creating a fictional world with fictional people. But it doesn’t seem to matter in the end. Inevitably we will need to ferret out some obscure fact to make our words ring true.
In previous blogs, we covered what to say in your writing and how. The last blog covered a list of quick tips for writing in various formats.
This blog will focus solely on writing for the ear—speeches, radio scripts, podcasts, narration tracks, and other audio forms. This type of writing is different than writing for the page.
The first two blogs in this series spoke to finding what to say in a blog, speech, article or podcast script, or other short form of writing. You can find them here and here.
Now we’re going to move onto practical tips to help you write your piece. Here are some quick tips to keep in mind:
Figuring out how to begin is always tough for writers. It’s the first big hurdle in the writing process. But with a little help, it doesn’t have to stop your progress.
This series breaks down the steps to figuring out what to write or say. To read the first blog in our series with steps one, two and three, click here.
Before you can write, you have to have something to say. It’s a pretty simple concept of putting ideas before words. Still it’s funny how often people sit down at their computer and expect to write a flawless article or speech without first considering how to develop their idea.
Now I get the whole “pantsing” it idea, but when it comes to writing short form pieces, it pays to get the idea clear in your head before you begin.
This is part two in Developing Characters. You can read the first part here. It talks about creating characters that are complete, like people. This part is focused on the big answers you need when creating a good character.
Building a character is harder than making a friend (which is not a small statement for an introvert to make). This is, of course, if you don’t make a habit of analyzing everything about your friends and their every action, which would be both presumptuous and rude, at the very least.
I began my professional writing career with a major corporation. Soon after starting that job, I was thrilled when my boss praised me for writing clean. What my boss was trying to say was that she liked that I could write quickly and needed few edits (mostly for those darned dangling participial phrases I love). The problem with her praise was that it stunted my growth as a writer. I leaned into the idea of writing clean and gladly whipped up assignments with little to no edits and called it good. My boss was happy. I was happy. What more did I need to do?
The answer was: a lot.
This is the second part of a blog on approaching a book like a writer. The first part can be found here.
The best way to learn how to write a novel is to pull some apart and analyze how they were put together. Here is the second part of things to look at during your dissection:
What I am advocating is to approach the book like a writer. Investigate what made the book work and fail. Pull it apart into its component parts — plot, character, scene, POV — and see how it was put together. There is no better master class in writing than looking deeply at the books you love and love to hate. But you have to be critical in your analysis.
Structure is 85% of your story. Never heard that before? Yeah, that’s because I made it up. I don’t think anyone has an exact statistic showing the importance of structure, but maybe they should. Structure is essential, even if the math of the thing is not. All you really need to know is that structure is essential to a good story, whether that story is fiction or nonfiction.
This is the final installation in my series on writing “rules.” If you missed the first two installments, you can read them here and here, respectively. These are the remaining “rules” of writing that all writers should know, with a couple of scriptwriting tips at the end for good measure.