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5 mistakes writers make when doing interviews, and how to avoid them
Interviewing someone for a story is difficult. Getting people to give you valuable, useful, interesting information in a colorful way is no small task. You need to ask good questions, follow up, take notes, as well as observe the environment and personal mannerisms. It’s a lot to process, and it only gets harder when you…
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Five ways to make writing harder than it needs to be
The more I write, the more I notice myself repeating the same mistakes during the writing process, bad habits that waste time and energy. Since I’m often short on both, it’s worth being aware of those pitfalls and trying to avoid them. Maybe others have the same issues. 1. Writing without a map Perhaps if…
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Writing for peanuts?
Linda Formichelli at the Renegade Writer blog posted an interesting piece on “writing for peanuts“: freelancers working for sites like Associated Content and… um, Examiner.com. Interesting discussion of some of the arguments and bad logic about freelancers who sell themselves shows and work for pennies. She does an effective demolition of many arguments many freelancers…
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Long-form narrative and the art of cooking slow food
In the Washington Post last week, Joel Achenbach wrote an interesting feature on the diminishing opportunities for long-form narrative nonfiction in the newspaper-death-spiral/Twitter/iPhone era. As seems to be the case anytime that I read about trends in the magazine and news business world these days, the outlook isn’t promising. There seem to be two lines…
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The stories we tell
One of my favorite shows of all time was Six Feet Under. What made the show so great was that, even though every once in a while something extraordinary happened, most of the drama came from every day life decisions: where to go to school, whether to stay in a relationship, or when to change…
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Writing: An “elitist” career?
Dana Goldstein, a former CAP co-worker who now writes for The Amercan Prospect, put up a post on “Journalism’s Elitism Problem.” In short, she points out that the career path for many professional writers involves four years of college education (and any debt that comes with that) followed by unpaid (or barely paid) internships, which…