Hi everyone! Yes. it is me, I am hoping to keep the guest posts from last month coming as a more regular thing on this feature, but as I couldn’t find anyone for February, you’re stuck with me again. I think today’s post should be pretty interesting though, I’m going to be talking about my experiences writing on different platforms and how I think these have helped me become a better fiction writer.
It’s no secret that I write A LOT. I’m a blogger, I write for student news website The National Student, my entire degree is writing based, and of course I have my novel, so honestly, there aren’t many points in a given day where I’m not writing something or other. And obviously practice makes perfect when it comes to writing, so any writing you do is good practice for writing a novel, but I think that particularly writing on different platforms and in different forums has been really important for me as a writer, for several different reasons.
Firstly, voice. Voice is something that a lot of writers can struggle with, finding the right voice for your character and making sure that comes through in your work is hard. However, I think that writing for different platforms has made it much easier for me to pick up that skill. For one thing, so much of Journalism is tailoring the voice of your piece to your audience. You’ll want your article to read a different way depending on the platform that your work will be accessed through, the “voice” is different for every paper, articles from The Guardian don’t read the same as the Daily Mail, or The Independent and that’s because as a journalist, you have to learn to write for your audience, and your audience is going to be different depending on where you write for, meaning that you have to get very good at tailoring your voice to the audience. This is obviously a massive help when it comes to writing fiction because the same rules apply, you’re going to want a different voice if you’re writing for a YA audience as compared to an adult audience, or an MG audience, or a younger child audience. Being able to change the voice you write in is also very useful if you write in multiple character POVs, so that the two do not sound exactly the same, and this is another place where my journalism skills have come in handy, when writing my novel, I imagine what I want the audience to see in my characters, and tailor their voice to that, just as I would do when writing an article for a specific audience.
Blogging, believe it or not, is also quite helpful for developing voice in stories, albeit in a different way. When I write my blog posts, I want it to feel as if I am talking to you, like we could just be sitting and having a conversation, and I’ve tried to carry this over to my fiction as well, as that was something that was really important to me when writing This Is Not A Love Story, I didn’t want it to feel like my audience would just be sitting there watching Tiffany and Cam go through the motions, I wanted it to feel like they could be sitting with the two of them and listening to them tell their own story. I don’t know how successful I’ve been with that, but that was the intention anyway!
Journalistic writing has been a massive help in making my writing more concise. I mean being concise isn’t as much of a requirement in fiction as it is in journalism, but personally, I hate authors that waffle on with unnecessary description that isn’t really needed, so when I write my book now, I keep the lessons that I’ve learned from Journalism in mind and make sure that every word I use has a point and I’m not waffling on for the sake of it!
Writing on different platforms also gives my brain a break when I’m getting bogged down in one of my stories. If I don’t feel like working on TINALS or Underground Magicians or the sequel to TINALS, then I can come here and write a blog post, or write something for The National Student, and I’m still flexing that writing muscle, but it gives me a chance to work on something else and let plot issues bubble over in the back of my brain whilst I’m doing so. It also adds some variety to my writing life that I’m not always constantly working on fiction and I think that in turn makes me a better writer because you need different skills to be a great journalist or a great blogger than you do to be an author, but there are lessons that you can learn from each which make you better at the others.
It does have it’s downsides, spending so much time writing, means that sometimes my hobby feels like a chore, and I do have to remind myself that it is something that I find fun and I’m not just doing it to get a degree or for my future career, I’m doing it because I love it. I think it’s very important to have hobbies outside of writing as well, especially when you spend as much time writing as I do, because you don’t want to feel completely burned out by it.
So yeah, basically, I would really recommend writing for different audiences and different platforms if you are a fiction writer, it gives you more flexibility, you can learn transferable skills from writing for different purposes, it allows you to have some variety in your writing and plus, it can just be fun sometimes to try your hand at writing different things!
If you are a writer, have you ever tried writing something outside of your normal remit? Anyone else do Journalism like me? Let me know in the comments!
I’ll have my Top Ten Tuesday post up for you guys tomorrow, and also Wednesday is my fifth blogaversary, so I’m going to have a very special Jo Talks post up to celebrate that milestone, so stay tuned for those in the next few days!
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Reblogged this on The Biblioanthropologist.
Thanks!