 Your Guide to a Successful Writing Career
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by Dawn Copeman
You see, there is more to writing an article than putting words down on paper. You have to choose an appropriate structure; write an engaging hook; match the target magazine's house style; keep the writing tight and on focus; ensure it ends in a way that satisfies the reader; and deliver everything you promised in the query. This is a lot to take in, but in these two articles I will guide you through each of these areas and show you how to write a successful article. Let's start by looking at article structures. Structure is another word for format. An appropriate structure will enable you to fit the facts of your article into the right slots to make an engaging and interesting read. There are five main types of article structure to select from.
The Inverted Pyramid. The Inverted Pyramid is the one that journalists often use. It developed in newsrooms when stories would often have to be cut to fit the print space available, especially when a better story came in that needed more coverage. In this structure all the important facts come first, followed by less important facts so that if the editor cuts the bottom off the story, the story would still make sense. You see examples of the inverted pyramid in newspapers every day: "Local woman Elise Margoldt (65) runs her first marathon to raise money for cancer charity. Elise, who has recently recovered from kidney cancer, ran the marathon on Sunday and raised $2045 for a national cancer charity. Elise first developed cancer at the age of 62," etc. The Double-Helix. We all know the structure of the double helix from DNA -- picture it in your head. In double helix-structured articles you have two sets of information to get across, two strands that dance around each other while they perform their own inverted pyramid. It goes something like this:
Let's say you were writing a piece about the recent World Cup in Germany and you wanted to write about the England vs Portugal match and a profile of a Portuguese doctor working in a busy A&E department. (A&E is the British equivalent of ER.) The actual story could be: Dr Pelegros was having a good shift in the A&E department until England player Wayne Rooney was sent off. With England down to ten men the game gets hard and the mood in the waiting room begins to deteriorate. England hold out but eventually lose on penalties. When the final whistle blows and England have lost the game; Dr Pelegros is attacked by a group of angry England fans in the waiting room. Our story thus has two strands:
So the structure would look like this:
And so on. The Chronological Double-Helix. This is similar to the structure above in that it begins with the main facts of the story from each strand, but once the main facts have been introduced, it reverts to a chronological telling of the events. In this format the above article would have the following structure:
The Chronological Report. This is stating things in the order that they happened. Let's take our Charity Marathon Runner again. In the Chronological Report, we would have: "Elise Margoldt was a healthy, active, 62-year-old records clerk in the DMV at Hudsonville when cancer turned her world upside down. Elise had been feeing 'a little bit off color, nothing major. I just kept on getting colds and feeling weak. I took myself off for a check-up knowing I just couldn't have cancer. Cancer makes you lose weight, I'd heard, and if anything I was putting weight on.'" This structure would then go through diagnosis, treatment, recovery, the marathon. The Storytelling Model. This is where fiction and non-fiction meet. In fiction you often get an event, then some back-story, then another event and so on, with the intention that you need to keep reading to find out what happens next, or why something that's already happened, happened. In the storytelling model you place your reader right in the middle of the action and then, when you've dragged them in, you continue with a chronological report up to the dramatic event you opened with and beyond that to what happened next.
"In the packed A&E department of St Oldrid's Hospital, London, on a hot Saturday afternoon in July, Dr Juan Pelegros is creating extra waiting time for his patients; he is having stitches himself following a vicious attack by a patient." The Storytelling model would continue with how and why Dr Pelegros came to be working in London, his hopes, how he's been finding the job here, the day of the England/Portugal match, what happened before he needed stitches, and what happened next. Which structure to choose? That's entirely up to you. Unless you're working in a news room, avoid the inverted pyramid. But all the other structures have a place in article writing. Play around with them and see which one reads best for the article you are working on; you might just be surprised.
Dawn Copeman is a UK-based freelance writer and educator who has published over 300 articles on the topics of travel, cookery, history, health and writing. An experienced commercial freelancer, Dawn contributed several chapters on commercial writing to Moira Allen's Starting Your Career as a Freelance Writer (2nd Edition). |
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