BlogHer Series Part 4: Personal Essays and News Writing

The next part of the BlogHer series include both personal essays and news writing workshops. (If you haven’t already read the last three parts, here they are: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Personal Essays
The personal essays workshop was moderated by Dr. Jessica Smock and Stephanie Springer of Her Stories Project. Jessica Smock is a writer, educator, former teacher, researcher, and mom to a toddler son. She lives in Buffalo with her family. She writes about parenting, education, and books at her blog, School of Smock. Stephanie Sprenger is a freelance writer, music therapist, and mother of two young daughters. She writes about the imperfect reality of life with kids at her blog, Mommy, for Real.

Here are some highlights from class:

1) Stories have a basic three-part structure. In a nutshell, these are beginning, middle and end. The beginning identifies the problem. The middle delves deeper into the problem. The end presents a change of character and satisfies the reader by character transformation.

2) Tell one story at a time. Use the rule of the pebble. When you’re on a beach, there are a lot of pebbles, but you don’t write about ALL the pebbles. You tell the story of just ONE pebble.

3) Combine the personal and the universal truths. Identify that moment of change, some anecdotes, epiphanies or self-realizations.

4) Write the actual story. Backstory is the enemy of personal essays. Just get into the meat story already. As you write your drafts, it would probably be best to scrap the first paragraph and start with the second or third.

5) Show, don’t tell. Although not anything new, it’s definitely worth repeating. Concrete details and anecdotes are more effective (like David Sedaris’ stories).

6) Have a narrative hook. You’ll need to grab the reader and start a lot further into your story. If needed, you could add the backstory later.

7) Have someone review your work. Get honest writerly feedback from Facebook groups like Susan Mackarelli’s Beyond Your Blog.

If you want more detail, here are the workshop slides.

News Writing
The next workshop was with Liz Neporent, a former ABC correspondent whose mission is to spread accurate, balanced information to the public about health and medicine. She’s written for major media outlets including The New York Times, NY Daily News, Shape, Self and Everyday Health. Two best-selling books include Fitness for Dummies and Weight Training for Dummies. She’s also a fitness expert with Acacia TV.

Most of this workshop was in a Q&A format.

Here are some highlights:

1) Have a hook. Liz said she received 50-100 pitches a day and only a few people got it right. As a writer, you need to say exactly as you’d report, have a hook, the rest will follow. Give value, sell a conversation. Editors don’t care what you’re selling unless it’s compelling to the reader.

2) Make it intriguing. Your headlines need to be sexy, so max out the headline. Don’t ask questions in a headline for news, instead say WHY you should or HOW you should. Also do keyword research for SEO purposes. Headlines also need to be searchable on search engines. A legendary headline would be “Headless woman found in topless bar.”

Also get the location in title, like Atlanta Housewives. Make sure your heading title is between 5-13 words.

3) Bring your best information to the top. Place your best info at top, first word to start, needs to be search organic. Have about 3-5 lengths per stories and 300 to 800 words.