Fiction Writers, You have a blogging advantage!


If there’s one thing I want to say to all fiction writers whose blogs I read, or whose posts I see on other sites, it’s that they have the advantage of storytelling. Look around at Internet news sites, or even off-the-radar sites like Cracked.com, the age of the storyteller in the delivery of information has returned. I say it’s returned because, believe it or not, the cold, impartial delivery of information, the one we associated with news greats like Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw, is not the way the news used to be delivered. I happened to learn this when the Seattle Times completed a project where they digitally archived their entire library of past issues, making them available to the public.

When a large ship that had sunk in an accident in the Puget Sound was being exhumed, the Seattle Times included the original article discussing the sinking. How shocked was I, upon reading it, to see long descriptions of the sinking, of the people escaping the boat—it wasn’t news, it was narrative, it was a story.

For a while, this type of information delivery went away, but it’s making a comeback, and the advantage is to creative writers. This new sub-genre of non-fiction is sometimes controversial and I refer to it as creative non-fiction, where the use of storytelling elements are applied in order to make a story, or a series of events, more consumable for an audience. Like it or not, Aristotle wrote over 2,000 years ago, in his Poetics, that human beings are basically only interested in one type of story, and we only want information delivered to us in that format.

Creative writers, take advantage of this as you embark on blog posts about vacations, or trips to political rallies, or to delivery information about something you’ve been studying. Be sure to put it in a three act structure, be sure to make sure you have a clearly established protagonist and antagonist, show the battle that is occurring—use your storytelling nature to deliver information, it’s how human being have been consuming information for thousands of years, fiction or not, and it’s the way readers most prefer.

Guest post by Justin Ordoñez. Justin Ordoñez wrote a book called Sykosa. It’s about a sixteen year old girl who’s trying to reclaim her identity after an act of violence destroys her life and the lives of her friends. You can find out more about Justin at his blog, http://sykosa.wordpress.com. You can also find Sykosa, the novel on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007N709IG/

6 Comments

  1. Mary Preston8 August 2012 at 11:58

    Very interesting. I don't know that I want my news delivered in a storytelling manner. 'Just the facts Jack'.

    marypres(AT)gmail(DOT)com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Goddess Fish Promotions8 August 2012 at 12:13

    Thank you for hosting Justin today

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rita Wray8 August 2012 at 19:31

    I enjoyed the post. I agree with Marybelle it was very interesting.
    Kit3247(at)aol(dot)com

    ReplyDelete
  4. MomJane9 August 2012 at 01:33

    I think it would be great to take a news story and write a story with that the main plot. It doesn't have to be factual, it is fiction after all.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Justin Ordonez9 August 2012 at 17:06

    Thanks for hosting me! I hope u will have me back one day!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Rebecca Hipworth10 August 2012 at 20:55

    Sounds very good!

    Becky01x(at)gmail(dot)com

    ReplyDelete

I love to hear from you. So feel free to comment, but keep in mind the basics of blog etiquette — no spam, no profanity, no slander, etc.

Thanks for being an active part of the Writers and Authors community.