Writing Feature Articles - Personal Experiences
Yesterday I showed you some brief examples as how writers by keeping their eyes and ears open were able to come up with special feature articles. Today I want to look at Personal Experience. What we actually do ourselves, as well as what we see others do, may be turned to good use in writing articles.
Personal experiences not only afford good subjects and plenty of material but are more easily handled than most other subjects, because, being very real and vital to the writer, they can the more readily be made real and vital to the reader. Many inexperienced writers overlook the possibilities of what they themselves have done and are doing. It’s the old adage: ‘write about what you know.’
To gain experience and impressions for their articles, special writers on newspapers and television often assume the roles of people whose lives and experiences they are reporting on. One Chicago paper featured every Sunday for many weeks articles by a reporter who, in order to get material, did a variety of things just for one day, from playing in a strolling street band to impersonating a convict in the state penitentiary.
Innumerable articles of the “how-to-do-something” type are accepted every year from inexperienced writers by publications that print such useful information. Results of experiments in solving various problems from adding new memory to a computer to changing the oil in an automobile: from how to grow your own salad leaves to additives to avoid are so constantly in demand by women’s magazines that housewives who like to write find a ready market for articles based on their own experience. There is a popular website that I visit regular, Ask The Builder, the owner, Tim Carter, makes a very good living out of telling readers how to do various building work around the home.
How to sites, like the one above, abound on the net today and you can turn them to your advantage. Maybe you’re not to sure of a particular technical detail – Google it. Maybe you’ve come across an interesting article on the web give your own spin to it.
Confession Articles. One particular type of personal experience article that enjoys great popularity is the so-called “confession story.” Told in the first person, often anonymously, a well-written confession article is one of the most effective forms in which to present facts and experiences.
Confessions of a drug addict, the confessions of a religious minister, the confessions of a restaurant owner….You could take every job in the word today place the word ‘Confession’ in front of it and you have the makings of a saleable article.
Personal experiences of others, as well as the writer’s own, may be given in confession form if the writer is able to secure sufficiently detailed information from some one else to make the story probable.
To secure confession features from readers, magazines have offered prizes for the best short articles on such topics as, “The Best Thing Experience has Taught Me,” “How I Overcame My Greatest Fault,” “The Day of My Great Temptation,” “What Will Power Did for Me.”
Having all these ideas are great but it is essential that you keep check of them. Tomorrow we look at how to keep check of your ideas.
