48 Tips in 48 Hours
Posted by kegill on April 17, 2007
From the National Writers Workshop in Hartford CT and Poynter. Examples:
- Be a reader. Friedman quoted from “Reading Like a Writer,” by Francine Prose. “Writers learn from reading the work of their predecessors.”
- Be curious, no matter what you’re writing. “Writing is having an innate curiosity about life. Even if you write fiction. You’re writing more than fiction, you’re writing about life.”
- “Why do my readers care about this story now?”
- Team up. Everyone has different strengths.
- “I look for stories about the human condition, the small stories that say something about who we are and where we are.”
- “Read the damn clips.” Newspapers are losing their institutional memory. Report the story that’s happening now, and tell the readers about the story that happened a decade ago.
