Snowflake Challenge #4: Goals

[ermingarden]

I hope all who celebrate had a pleasant Superb Owl Sunday!

Very late, but here’s Snowflake Challenge #4: Set your own goals!

A big goal for me this year is improving my writing process, making it more systematic and having stronger divisions between the brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and editing phases. I'm mainly focused on my professional writing - learning how to craft better legal briefs - but I expect that what I learn will impact my fanfic writing as well.

Relatedly, if anyone has recommendations for books or other resources you found really helpful when it comes to improving your writing - product or process - I’d appreciate hearing them! (I’ve read Bryan Garner’s The Winning Brief, Brand & White’s Legal Writing: The Strategy of Persuasion, and Ross Guberman’s Point Made.)

Comments

[atamascolily]

On Writing Well by William Zinsser and Strunk and White's Elements of Style are classics for a reason.

For my nonfiction writing, understanding ledes was such a huge game-changer. I don't know if there's an equivalent for legal briefs, but playing "find the lede" while reading various articles is a great exercise that will improve your writing overall.

[ermingarden]

Thanks! I'll be adding those to the list.

We don't use the same terminology, but the equivalent of the lede (as I understand it) might be the statement of the issue(s)?

[atamascolily]

Ooh, yes, exactly! It's the moment where you tell the reader exactly what your piece is about, ideally in a way that "hooks" them to continue reading. The difference between legal/scientific writing and other journalistic forms of nonfiction (at least as I understand it) is in the latter, you have a little more flexibility in both the way the lede is written and its overall placement--you can do a straightforward "summary" lede as the first sentence of the article, which is more akin to a statement of the issues, and which you'll see in typical news articles, OR you can do a more delayed lede for longer and more complex pieces. It all depends on what you're doing and the way you frame it!

The lede is the thing that I think about the most while writing nonfiction because it's the most important part of any piece and what makes it work (or not). Sometimes I know right away what it is, and sometimes I only figure it out after paragraphs of material, which I then examine for the central theme/commonality/most important point and distill that into becoming the lede.

Ledes don't have to be flashy or dramatic, but my favorites are always the ones that it makes me writhe with jealousy and mutter, "oh my god, I wish I'd written that".