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/
