Writing with form

Lisa Gray talked about writing with forms. Is the column a profile or a narrative? Is it an essay or a story? 

You have to make choices about these things. Writers are always thinking about those decisions. They think about how they are going to organize the material. 

Writing opinion pieces is no different from writing other stories. You can’t just say to yourself, “I know my opinion. Now I’ll just let it rip.”  That’s what the ranters and ravers and some of the bloggers do. 

But you’re all better than that. You know you want to push the story ahead with information. Now how do you make the choices?

You can’t do better than to go the Writer’s Craft website and read David McHam’s handouts for feature writing. There’s a lot of good advice there, especially in the handouts about organization. If you haven’t had advanced reporting or feature writing, check these out. if you have had them, they’re well worth reviewing. 

He’s good on writing the lead and about writing the bridge from the lead. 

The simplest advice, but the hardest to follow, is to make each paragraph about a distinct subject. We’ve heard this advice over and over again, but still all sorts of ideas fly into paragraphs. The mind is a wilful and wild thing.  This is where you make a choice. Decide what the paragraph is about. Include only information that fits the topic.

Keep the paragraphs short. Two or three sentences to a paragraph. Long paragraphs don’t read well, either on blogs or in columns of type.

Keep the sentences short. When a sentence goes beyond 22 or 23 words, readers have trouble following it. 

Think about varying the sentence length, the way I did above, and here. Play with the rhythms. Short sentences can be emphatic.

Too many short sentences in a row make the rhythm dull and choppy and predictable.

Above all, know your form. Think about the form. Plan the form. Make decisions.