Creative Writing Course

MODULE 1 (Non-Fiction or News Writing)

Why non-fiction?

Because if you learn to master the art of writing or reporting on reality you’ll find the creation of fiction much easier.

Having said that the journalist or reporter is rarely a writer. They act more as detectives, gathering information which is then collated into readable prose by sub-editors. We all learn to write as very young children, but somehow many never manage to master the techniques of producing basic understandable prose which transmits the writer’s message clearly and concisely. Any brief browse round the internet will prove that. Websites abound with grammatical and spelling errors and yet one assumes that those who post this material are at least computer literate.

So what differentiates writers from non-writers? Writers write and non-writers don’t. Seems simple, but in writing, the competent writer learns and enhances his ability.

You can too.

I’m not here to teach basic spelling or grammar, that’s a task you must assume yourself. The only comment I’ll make is – don’t trust spellcheckers because they know nothing of context. To them ‘their’ and ‘there’ are both correct spellings, but only in the correct place. By all means run a spellcheck over your material for glaring errors. But you must do a personal check to pick up what the machine’s missed.

So, let’s get to it.

The first thing the young journalist is taught is how to structure a news story. Remember that word ‘structure’, you’ll be reading it a lot.

Here are some facts -

Johnny Wilson is dead.

His mother is divorced from his father.

They live in the Kingston area.

The bus was traveling at forty miles per hour.

Johnny was 11 years old.

Johnny’s mother’s name is Kathleen.

The accident happened at 11.15.

Mrs Wilson has two other children.

The driver of the bus was Mr Abdul Kareem.

There was snow and ice on the road.

There were no witnesses to the accident.

Johnny was going to the local shops.

The bus skidded at the corner of Hearn Street and Forest Avenue.

Sgt. Thomas of the local police said Our enquiries are continuing. No one has been charged.

Mrs Wilson works in a local factory.

Let’s turn this into a brief news story, suitable for a local newspaper, using the following formula-

What happened?

Who did it happen to?

Where did it happen?

When did it happen?

How did it happen?

Why did it happen?

We should end up with something like this.

An 11 year old boy was killed by a skidding bus at the corner of Hearn Street and Forest Avenue yesterday morning.

The boy was named as Johnny Wilson who lives locally. He is survived by his mother and two sisters.

Johnny was visiting the local shops when the bus, driven by Mr Abdul Kareem, seemed to skid on the icy roads and hit the boy. The local police are investigating the accident.

That transmits the vital information of this tragic accident by a simple process of editing. Follow up stories may well dwell on Mrs Wilson’s divorced state and her occupation in a factory, but at the moment they are irrelevant.

I’m telling you this because good writing is not writing it’s rewriting, or editing. If you can’t take your raw material and structure it you’re wasting your time. Admittedly, anyone reading the basic facts as given above would have been able to establish the events, but the writer makes it easier by turning them into an easily digestible narrative. The same principle is used by fiction writers, but in their case to generate an emotional response, whether terror, humour or whatever.

And these same principles apply to all writing in spades. Burn this into your brain – STRUCTURE, STRUCTURE, STRUCTURE !!!

But we must carry this theory of structure down a level into the very paragraphs and sentences your prose consists of. And if you think that’s carrying structure a little too far, be glad we’re not structuring individual words.

Don’t look upon structure as your enemy, claiming that the creative muse is stifled by such constraints. Let it help you in developing your argument by submitting your material to analysis.

You’re better doing the analysis yourself and finding the flaws before somebody else does it for you and saddles you with unwanted criticism.

Imagine the events in your story actually happened in real life and were to be reported in a newspaper. How would it read? I’m asking you to get involved in a process of reverse engineering, where the news story comes before the ‘events’. Having created the structure with the news story, your fiction should then just require you to fill in some extra details (and some flair!).

If this sounds too mechanical, don’t worry too much. I’m only putting you through this because you have to learn to walk before you can run. Once this