The Craft of Professional Writing

Michael S. Malone

Description

The most complete book ever written about the real-life work of being a writer.

‘The Craft of Professional Writing’ is the complete book ever written about the real-life work of writing for a living. It not only provides an in-depth description of every important job in professional writing, from PR and advertising to technical writing to journalism and fiction and non-fiction book authorship, but also includes extensive practical advice and hacks on how to report, prepare, pitch, edit and invoice your work – as well as how to successfully conduct a writing career. There also are extensive models of actual products in each of these fields.

For the student, this is the most wide-ranging and practical textbook on the subject. It is designed to be an instructional text for producing professional-level work – but also a survey of the various writing professions to enable budding writers to make career decisions. The goal is to empower graduates to hit the ground running – and to quickly establish themselves in the professional writing world.

For the professional, this book, written by an author who has been successful in almost every writing discipline, is the ultimate reference work – offering practical tips to their current field, as well as a guide to other writing professions. ‘The Craft of Professional Writing’ also offers these experienced writers work advice they can return to again and again to help them through various phases of their career.

Introduction; Part One — Basics; 1. Gathering Information; 2. Words, Sentences and Paragraphs; 3. Narrative and Composition; Part Two — Corporate Careers and Disciplines; 4. Publicist; 5. Advertising Copywriter; 6. Speechwriter; 7. Technical Writer; Part Three — Writing Careers in Media; 8. Blogger; 9. News Reporter; 10. Critic; 11. Essayist; 12. Book Author; 13. Television and Radio News Reporter; 14. Screenwriter and Playwright; 15. Fiction Writer and Novelist; 16. Academic Track; 17. Miscellaneous Writing; Part Four — The Work of Professional Writing; 18. Pitching; 19. Editing; 20. Rejection; 21. A Writer’s Life.; Further Reading; Suggested Assignments; Index.

Sujets

• General officer
• Interdisciplinarity
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 13 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781783088317
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Craft of Professional Writing
The Craft of Professional Writing
A Guide for Amateur and Professional Writers
Michael S. Malone
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Michael S. Malone 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-829-4 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-829-X (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
To every person who ever wrote a sentence and wondered if they could make a living from it.
Contents
Introduction
Part One: Basics
1. Gathering Information
2. Words, Sentences and Paragraphs
3. Narrative and Composition
Part Two: Corporate Careers and Disciplines
4. Publicist
5. Advertising Copywriter
6. Speechwriter
7. Technical Writer
Part Three: Writing Careers in Media
8. Blogger
9. News Reporter
10. Critic
11. Essayist
12. Book Author
13. Television and Radio News Reporter
14. Screenwriter and Playwright
15. Fiction Writer and Novelist
16. Academic Track
17. Miscellaneous Writing
Part Four: The Work of Professional Writing
18. Pitching
19. Editing
20. Rejection
21. A Writer’s Life
Further Reading
Suggested Assignments
Index
Introduction
This book is about the work—the craft —of professional writing. It is written for those who make writing their career and those who hope to do so.
There’s an endless number of books about finding your inner writer, about how to write elegant sentences and how to call down the Muse to help you pen your novel. This book is about none of those things. It takes as a given that you know how to write, that you care passionately about writing, and that you make—or want to make—writing the centerpiece of your career.
It is that commitment to being part of the unofficial guild of professional writers that informs this book. It is not your typical textbook. For one thing, while it has an explicit structure, it is written in a more literary style than you may be used to. It also contains stories and anecdotes, both good and bad, from my own checkered career. Why? Because when veteran writers of every stripe get together, they swap stories. For the apprentice sitting in on one of those conversations the acquired wisdom conveyed in these stories is far more important than, say, the rules of grammar. They teach how to live as a writer: how to start your career, how to manage it and how to end it.
Central to this book is the belief that writing really is a craft. As such, all writing you do as a professional is the same, whether it is a press release or an experimental novel. Up close—which is where every writer finds himself or herself when writing—all writing is words and sentences. How much art you imbue those words with depends upon your talent and your ambitions. But first comes the work of writing: If you don’t complete the task before you, you will fail. And you won’t get paid. And you will have to find another career.
The craft of writing is about not letting that happen. It is about having the right tools and techniques to carry you to success and having the insider knowledge to guarantee that success over and over through the course of your career.
I am a college professor, but I am neither an academic nor a textbook writer. Rather, I have been a professional writer for forty years, much of it as a freelancer. During those years when I had a real job, I was, at various times, a corporate public relations professional, a newspaperman and the editor of the world’s largest-circulation technology business magazine. But it is as a freelancer, like many of my peers, that I have had the most eclectic writing experiences. Over the years I have been a blogger, columnist, speechwriter, television host, producer and writer, music critic, movie reviewer, book reviewer, screenwriter, author, playwright, novelist and now, a textbook writer. It was, in fact, the remarkable range of my writing experiences (which, believe me, was never planned) that led me to write this textbook. Most of these experiences weren’t driven by any particular creative desire, but more often by just the need to pay the bills and feed my family—motivations, I suspect, that I share with most of my fellow professional writers. Some of the work I created in these different disciplines was quite good, some of the rest was mediocre, but I can say that I always put the writing first, and gave it everything I had.
I used to fantasize about becoming a novelist, of writing what I wanted without the pressures of bosses, deadlines and the marketplace. Then I became one—and I still faced all of those pressures, and I still needed to make money. The Muse still shows up to whisper sweet sentences in my ear, but she is a very unpredictable goddess; she doesn’t have a schedule and she never leaves her phone number. And so, while you wait for her to reappear, all you can do is keep writing in the most professional way. You will also probably win some of those awards you dream of, but probably too late to matter and not for your best work. That’s how real-life, professional, writing works.
The second tenet of this book is that not only is all writing essentially the same, but that all writing careers are valid. Each discipline has its own rules, its own standards, its own professional tricks, and its own examples of exemplary work. As such, each of these disciplines calls upon its writers to be professional by following those rules, to take the work seriously, and to write to the best of their ability every day. If the corporate speechwriter doesn’t enjoy the public renown of the famous playwright or the income of the blockbuster screenwriter, that doesn’t make the speechwriter’s career as a writer any less valid, or the work any less important. Indeed, more than almost any other form of writing, great speeches have changed the world.
That said, professional writing careers do often have different trajectories based upon the nature of the work and the client or employer. Some jobs, such as news reporting, start out strong and often slowly fade; while others, such as criticism, start slowly but grow stronger toward the end. Because of that, each professional writing career typically has different strengths and weaknesses and, just as important, each has different turning points, where the writer must make some crucial decisions about what to do next.
This book is divided into three parts. The first looks at writing careers in the business world, which is where most jobs for writers are found. The second, and largest, section looks at the wide array of writing work—full-time and freelance—that is found within the media, from blogging to reporting, columnist to book author. And the third offers advice on the day-to-day business of professional writing, including pitching, rejection, billing and editing. The final chapter offers advice on how to conduct your life as a writer.
The chapters are divided into an overview of each particular career, occasionally a brief history of the profession, a collection of tips and advice and then a list of the good and bad traits of the job and its turning points. I’ve also included examples of some of the best work in each field and templates for some of the tools of the trade (such as a standard-form invoice) that you may want reference in the years ahead. In some chapters—notably news reporting and novel-writing —I’ve added special sections in order to either look at a related specialty career (such as investigative reporting) or to provide more detail on the actual work (such as novel writing).
Finally, as already noted, throughout the text I’ve salted in stories from my own career that relate to the topic at hand. A few are stories of triumph or failure, but most exhibit the messiness of real life as a professional writer and, with luck, will spare you some of the same mistakes.
My hope is that, for the professional writer, this text will serve as a reference, not for your current career necessarily, but for when you are asked to step outside your usual writing work to take on a different writing task. With luck, the chapter on that type of writing will get you quickly up to speed. It is also for those times in your career—and every writer has them—when you want to stretch your talents and try something new, either as a hobby or as a brand-new career trajectory. The appropriate chapter should give you a good idea of how different that new direction is from your current path.
For students who dream of writing careers this book is designed to be a survey course—with a twist: It doesn’t look at just the forms of professional writing, or even its standard tools. It also wanders off into the woods t