5 Ways to Improve Your Feature Writing

Feature writing for print is changing. Once upon a time the only competition magazines and other feature-friendly media had was the newspaper, and then only on Sundays. But the Web’s instant-satisfaction information high has shortened attention spans. To hold the reader’s attention through page after page takes careful planning and some extra thought. Here are five tips that can help improve your feature writing and help hold an audience through those flash ads and hot links.

1. Actionable information: This is a new term I am going to take credit for, because I personally think this is the most critical thing you can do to create impactful feature writing. Don’t think it’s enough to simply write about an interesting subject and present it. You can be a complete hack but if you provide some sort of next-step information, people can help out, donate, visit, buy or whatever else they want to do because of you. I believe print writing with this one added element can hold up to anything on the Web, because the Web then acts as a resource to augment the story instead of a competing medium.
2. Flow: Suppose a writer hears about a musician, then goes to his show, then interviews him. If I had to guess, I would say about half the writers would begin their piece, “I heard about X one night at the coffee house…” simply because that was their experience. But the best writing is writing without ego. Take all the pieces and lay them out there. Capture the audience with your most compelling facts right off, and then keep them going with the strength of your storytelling.I would not recommend this strategy when you have a complicated subject that needs some back story or additional information. In that case, find the most relevant tie-in to your audience and start there; in order to hold audience attention through difficult or complicated storytelling, you have to make it relevant.
3. Pacing: Cut a third of what you write for tighter writing, every time. Enough said.
   
4. Character development: Make your characters interesting, and don’t think that just because they are real people, they aren’t characters. They have flaws and needs and emotions just like the rest of us. Be observant and catch those details. Present them—don’t simply write about them–and you’ll be rewarded.
5. Predictibility: Obvious cat is obvious: Any kind of mass-media has a predictable style. The typical broadcast news story begins with a fact, a contradiction (pun or cliché here optional) and a sound bite: “The City of Fort Worth says it charges all residents the same amount for water. But in one neighborhood, residents are crying foul. (SOT)” Try to identify the scripts in your genre. Identifying these scripts serves you in two ways: First, you can resist subconsciously conforming to them. Second, you can use them to your advantage by setting up your audience to expect a script and then giving it a twist.

With these tools, you can keep your audience and make your stories stickier, whether they are on the Web or on the page.

Tags: actionable information, BurtCreative, feature writing, freelance writing, improving your writing, magazine, newspaper, writing tips