Creative Writing 101

Source: telegram

Class? Class! Shut Up! (sorry, I just fell into a "Sister Mary Elephant" reverie)

Today we're going to learn how to use 'creative language' to "tell a story" when writing a "news" article. Pay attention, luckily we have an excellent example of this style of propa..., I mean technique...

A climate of fear has cast a pall over the local immigrant community in the wake of a government crackdown in a seaport town a hundred miles away.

When hundreds of federal agents checked into Fitchburg and Leominster [pron: leehahaministerahchawdah] hotels several days before they stormed New Bedford-based Michael Bianco Inc., rumors of a local raid spread quickly.

"It is devastating to families," said Matthew Feinstein of the Worcester Global Action Network. "The police presence caused many to fear to go to work or send their children to school."

As you can see, the effective use of action verbs and descriptors changes what would in the real world be a hum-drum police blotter page story into something that crackles with suppressed energy.

No namby-pamby entered for our intrepid scribbler here, no sir, no ma'am! STORMED!! I can almost see the high, tasty gleam off the obsessively polished jackboots and taste the deliciously fascist repression. How about you?

And that's good writing right there, if this were fiction of course.

Being a creative writer as opposed to boring old journalist allows our intrepid scribbler many liberties, by way of example? "Climate of fear?" Really? Do they come equipped with white lab coat clad scientist approved devices for testing the "fear climate?"

Because if not, this again takes us into the realm of fiction. Not that there's anything wrong with fiction, you know, in a work of fiction, which this resembles more than a tiny little bit.

The use of the term immigrant while leaving off such foolish unpleasantness as "illegal" or even the softer and stupider "undocumented" has become a hallmark of the genre and hardly merits a mention.

And of course the failure to explain who and what the far, far, extremely far left group The Global Action Network is simply par for the course.

I hope the close and careful study of this "news" article has helped you improve your fiction writing skills, I know it has mine.

Fearful aliens attempting to survive illegally in the climate of fear generated by their own illegal entry!

H/T Lonewacko

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