…a little piece on the importance of word choice
Another writing post up on “Do You Know Where YOUR Story Is?”
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Category Archives: skills and technique
Comments on consistency
[excerpted from my current post on “Do You Know Where YOUR Story Is?]
- I don’t care if all the inhabitants of a planet are legless, have a single blue eye, gills, and live in a tank where they are dependent on water, melons, and cress to live. Just don’t suddenly have their out-of-town cousin travel in on the next train walking on three legs, smoking a cigar, and using four eyes to watch me out of the back of their head. It doesn’t fit the world you built.
- Writing romance? I know, love at first sight. But meeting a mysterious stranger, marrying them on the same page and going off to live in Saigon when you’re a celibate rocket scientist in the midst of a critical development is not going to work. That scientist, upon the entrance of the stranger, would more logically say, “Get out of my lab, I’m busy. Security!” If that romance is going to happen, it won’t be the way the writer wrote it the first time.
- Time travel; it’s tricky. There are various types of time travel, and you have to decide what rules yours is going to follow. Does the traveler control the travel? Do they remember their own time? Can they get back? And the all-important: will anything they do in the past affect the future they left behind? Whatever rules you choose, you have to work consistently within them or readers will call foul. I certainly will.
- Just as bad—not playing fair with the reader in a mystery. Mystery lovers want to solve the mystery along with the detective. Not letting them have the same clues the detective does isn’t fair. It’s fine if the detective doesn’t reveal what they’ve concluded from the clues—after all, you want that big reveal at the end. But you can’t hide the actual clues from the reader. (Although you can make them obscure.)
I’ve probably driven writers crazy harping on this, but it bears repeating.
No matter how unique, exotic, bizarre the world a writer creates becomes, it needs to maintain an internal consistency. Even if that world is based on being random and illogical. Then it must be consistently inconsistent.
–moi
Sometimes maintaining order in our fictional worlds is all we can maintain. Do so.
TIP ~ INKAS ~ #6
The NEWS in SPORTS! Sportswriting
2–3 minutes
The headline gives the best clue to INKA #6. SPORTSWRITING is all about writing the news of the sports world. It can be anything from a coverage of elementary school field day to the SuperBowl. The activity and venues change, but not the reporting.
Sports reporting captures the essence of a sport; it puts the fans in the seats and gives them all the latest info on the game, the players, and how the team is doing. It may not be the next best thing to being there, but it provides essential information to the “other members of the team”–the fans.
Sportswriting–which includes narrative stories–may be about the sport itself, and may be written as an essay, an editorial, or even a piece of fiction. The important thing is that a sport or sports is at the center of the story, and it is still geared towards–the fans.
The broadness of this category makes it seem hard to find the common thread in writing for it.
What does “Days of Thunder” have to do with the news report of the high school football scores? Or the high school golf team?
For that matter, what does the high school golf team story actually have to do with a story on Tiger Woods?
The first commonality is the obvious one: the focus is a sport and its players.
The next is the fact that, although the medium differs (“Days of Thunder” is a film, as is “Friday Night Lights”; “Dirt” is a documentary; The 1997 Masters: My Story is Tiger Woods’s autobiographical reflection on that tournament), sports stories help relate a sport to its fans by providing insight into the game, how it is played, and what its athletes experience.
While some readers may look on the information simply as the facts of their team, many others will vicariously experience a sport through the story, or perhaps relive their own sport highs and lows. There is an invisible thread–or even rope–that connects a sport and its fans, binding them together and creating a self-sustaining culture vital to the their lives in terms of physical, philosophical, and emotional well-being. Entire industries are built around sports and their venues and events. The support the industry receives is indicative of how important sports are to fans. This makes for a ready audience of readers for written material and viewers for video.
It’s about the sport and the fans; and there’s a reason the word ‘fan’ stems from fanatic.
Sportswriters must understand their sport, either through personal experience or research. That research must include attending sporting events, experiencing the crowd, and even trying their hand at the sport (no matter how silly they might feel about it). Interviews with players, coaches, trainers, and even physicians and phys ed teachers are essential to understanding what you are writing. Talking with fans or statisticians and the kids who tend the balls and bats is also effective. Because essentially writing about sports is still writing about people. People and their passion for an activity. It’s about the sport and the fans; and there’s a reason the word ‘fan’ stems from fanatic.
Finding Robin's Story 