How to Become a Writer

Video Transcript

"So I have a couple of rules that I function by and when I first started writing a good friend of mine said "well you know a story has three main pieces, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end". It sounds obvious but you'd be surprised how many stories don't have a good beginning, don't have a good middle, and don't have a very good end. I mentioned earlier that Harlin Ellison, and l learned a very good bit of information from Harlin Ellison who wrote gazillions of t.v. scripts, and it's cut to the chase. You have in television a few brief seconds to capture the attention of your audience to get them to sit there and watch another 56 minutes of programming and commercials to see what happens next. The same thing happens with a book or on the radio. When you open a book and if those first few pages don't capture your attention, you're not going to read the rest of the book. You're not going to be, you know, pulled into that book where you're going to say " gee what's going to happen next? I want to find out what happens next, I want to find out how they got here and what happens next." For that, it's very important to have a very good opening. The same thing, I've found, happens even if you're writing a business plan or you're writing an application to a bank for a business loan. Whatever it is, whatever your writing is, it's a matter of storytelling. Storytelling has to cut to the chase, grab your attention. Once you have your audience's attention then it will allow you to pull themselves through the story and to really become part of it and experience it. In the current project that I'm working on it right now is that there's another element that comes before the beginning, middle, and end and that is to listen to your audience. It's very important to understand your audience, who you're writing to. Who you're giving the story to. Who, in the end, is either going to read or listen to the story you are about to tell. And, understand where they are coming from and this gives you the ability to make sure that your beginning, middle, and end grab them and it's something that they can relate to. Therefore, they will be even more engaged in what it is you have to tell. I think the last thing I am going to touch on is something that if you go out and read all the books on how to become a published author. The first thing that the pros will tell you, that "they" as I call them, will is they'll tell you to go out and read every bestselling book and figure out the voice that the author wrote it and write just like that because that's what the big publishing companies want. But, the reason those books are successful is the public up those books because they were in a new and fresh and different voice. They were in the author's original voice. If you ask a Stephen King or ask a Dean Koontz or a Tom Clancy, you know, "who's style did you copy?" They are going to tell you they didn't. They wrote their own voice and that's what captivated their audience."