Journalism

Write a part of a story in the form of journal entries. Everything that happens in the story will most likely happen between the entries. Make sure your readers can see the events off stage, but also present your journalist’s blind spots – She will not present the whole story, just parts of it. Your journal writer may not even understand the significance of the events until a few entries later – if ever. Keep all entries close together in time (within a week or two). This exercise will challenge those who think there is no limit to realism: Make sure that the journal writer is telling a story – showing as often as telling, revealing things about herself. In other words, you have to work just as hard in this exercise to choose the words of this narrator. Writers will tend to think that this journalist can say anything and not look outside of herself Avoid completely self-absorbed narrators here – and everywhere. 700 words.

Mark Mirsky chastised the occasional writer in his workshops for indulging in journalism as opposed to fiction. (By this he meant writing found in journalism writing found in journalism or diaries – although he also intended us to hear the overlapping meaning of newspaper-written reality). Journalism accepts the world at face value. Fiction delves below the surface of reality, spending most of its time proving that there are many levels below the accepted surface.

Another (hidden) point of this exercise is to convince you to keep journals. Writers learn how to write by writing miles and miles of pages. Get some blank books and become a regular and tough-minded observer of the world around you. How else do you get practice writing fiction than by paying close attentions to what’s nearest at hand?