Freedman: Writing

"I have never begun to write an article until I knew exactly what it was I wanted to say."

"Writers need to read books that way, not as spectators but as apprentices."

"I recognize that nothing sounds very poetic in the basic hard news story or the “human-interest” news-feature, and magazine, radio and broadcast journalism all have their comparable templates. At their best, though, these forms are our sonnets, our haikus, our iambic pentameter, and we gain something by learning how to express ourselves, indeed how to bear witness to the world, within their rigors."


Freedman gives a lot of solid advice in this section, but I really could identify with the third quote above. When I sat down to write my first story for this class, I wanted to really grab the reader’s attention with a lead that was intricate and thought provoking. Unfortunately, I just ended up rambling and never got to the point of the story. When Chris told me to tighten up the lead in class, at first I felt like that would take all the creativity and personal flavor out of the writing. At that point, I hadn’t quite grasped the concept of the news lead and its purpose.

What I’ve come to realize a bit more since is that the type of hard news story we’re writing in this class follows a certain structure. While it’s more difficult to give these stories as much personal flair as it would be while writing something like a feature, I think the story as a whole becomes a vehicle for our thoughts and visions, like Freedman mentions above. I love baseball, so my article was a piece of me, at least on some level. I think that was an important realization for me, and it will definitely help me in the future.