Writing Right with Dmitri: Writing for the Edited Guide

0 Conversations

Words, words, words. That's what we're made of. Herewith some of my thoughts on what we're doing with them.

Writing Right with Dmitri: Writing for the Edited Guide

A man in green with a feather in one hand and drawing a theatre curtain with the other

We've put this off long enough. It's time to have 'The Talk' – the one about the Edited Guide.

I realise that most of the readers here are working on fiction most of the time. But if you're a h2g2 Researcher, sooner or later you feel obligated to contribute to the world's premiere Guide to Life, the Universe, and Everything. For the next few months, Create has issued a Challenge Extra: rescue something from the Flea Market. Good idea. We need to be writing. We want to be expanding our database. We want to get out there and delight, inform, change minds.

Before we talk about writing, let's talk about our audience. Who are we writing for? Surprisingly, perhaps, there are almost as many answers to that question as there are Researchers. You might write an Entry for:

  • Students who need Homework Help.
  • Readers who share your hobby or special interest.
  • Seekers after advice. (They've come to the right place, you are a certified Sage.)
  • People who might have similar problems to ones you've encountered.
  • Fellow h2g2ers.

Me, I tend to write for the imaginary reader in the wilds of Kamchatka. You know, the person in the Arctic cold, shivering over a computer, wondering what the rest of the planet is like. I want to make that person chuckle and say, 'Hey! I never knew that, how interesting.' I'm assuming this imaginary person is bringing a bit of curiosity to the exercise, but not a lot of knowledge. And I'm not assuming he knows much about where I've been.

Once you've settled on a target audience, you need to pick a topic. Here I have a few suggestions.

  • You could do as Create suggests, and rescue something from the Flea Market. Hey, I just looked – there's an unfinished entry on Carlos Castaneda. . .
  • You could pick your own topic from among your personal wide-ranging interests. (Be sure to use the Search button to see what's already there.)

Okay, you know you're the world's authority on bicycle sprockets/Canada/nature/anything at all to do with the Isle of Wight. What next? Pick your area and plunge in? I venture a caveat here: if you aren't careful, you'll end up with a topic so vast that it would require a dissertation. Let me share a trick I've learned.

One of the major reasons for Guide Entry exhaustion is that the Researcher picks a topic – say, desert worms. (Why not?) You start researching, and find out that, surprise, there are lots of deserts. There's the Sahara, and the Gobi, and the Kalahari. . .and then there are big worms, and little worms, phyla and genera, and. . . Before you know it, you're making tables, and people are yawning. Worse, you find out that most of these worms are really small and uninteresting.

So you stop and think: what interests me about desert worms? Is there a question I wanted to answer? Maybe, 'Does the Mongolian Death Worm exist? Why or why not?' O-kayyy. . . now, that you can handle. Or something more sensible, like 'Why don't worms live in the desert? What effect does that have on the soil?' Or a thrilling (and possibly hilarious) narrative beginning 'What happened when a bunch of yahoos with cameras went hunting for the Mongolian Death Worm?'

Think of a question. Use it as a hook to get the reader interested. Tell as much background as you need to make the story clear. Avoid tables, if possible, and eschew unnecessary excurses into side issues that you might find fascinating, but which might tax your reader's attention span. Pay heed to the advice I got from my first teaching trainer: 'Remember, they're bored about ten minutes before you are.'

Here's another little exercise: you know how certain male persons who work in offices and do not know better spend their coffee-break time playing the 'versus' game? Such as, 'Klingons versus Smurfs, who wins'? Try this out as a way to focus your Guide Entry. Ask, what two disparate elements can I combine to give my entry some oomph? I've managed to combine a French stage magician and an Algerian uprising, a water tower and music, websites and railway carriages. . . you get the idea.

So go to the Flea Market. Or make up your own topic. Spend a couple of idle hours noodling around the web. Then put your imagination to work.

The Guide Editors will love you for it. And Create will give you a badge. Best of all, some user in Kamchatka will get a huge chuckle out of the saga of how the Discovery Channel went looking for giant worms in the Gobi Desert.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

30.07.12 Front Page

Back Issue Page


Bookmark on your Personal Space


Conversations About This Entry

There are no Conversations for this Entry

Entry

A87766104

Infinite Improbability Drive

Infinite Improbability Drive

Read a random Edited Entry


Disclaimer

h2g2 is created by h2g2's users, who are members of the public. The views expressed are theirs and unless specifically stated are not those of the Not Panicking Ltd. Unlike Edited Entries, Entries have not been checked by an Editor. If you consider any Entry to be in breach of the site's House Rules, please register a complaint. For any other comments, please visit the Feedback page.

Write an Entry

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."

Write an entry
Read more