Creating poetry in the lead

The following entry strays from the journalism path, but perhaps we need that sometimes. As this semester draws to a close I am reminded just how submerged in journalism I’ve been over the last 15-weeks. Two, 600 word stories, reported on and written in a revolving 7-day turnaround. Add to that a 40 hour work weeks, family and full-time school. It’s all been very exhausting. So much in-fact that it got me thinking: Is journalism helping me lose my grip on the art of writing?

Entertaining that thought, I decided to crack open one of my favorite verse novels, Stop Pretending by Sonya Sones. The book is a collection of poems, layout in the form of a novel. It tells the story of a girl who has a mental breakdown, told in the narrative of her younger sister. The beginning poem reads:

MY WHOLE FAMILY
I can
remember what
things were like before she
got sick: my whole family climbed
into

the big
hammock on the
moondappled beach, wove
ourselves together, and swayed
as one.

This is a fanatic lead to a very completing story. It provides the reader with a taste of what the book is about, while withholding the information just enough to keep them reading. Sones, as all good writers, can teach us something as journalism. It doesn’t always have to be about the cut and dry newsroom bubble. We can learn how to be better writers from anywhere. I wrote about a similar topic a few weeks ago and I invite you to check out that article titled, “GoodWriters Listen.”

The editing mistake this week comes from the accursed 144-character world of Twitter.

Dolph Ziggler is one of the most active, witty and punctual wresters on Twitter. I think this tweet is a matter or sacrificing punctuation for character space. This is one of the follies of the 144-character format on Twitter. things like "you're" and periods at the end of sentences are sacrificed for the sake of the message. I guess that still doesn't make up for the obvious capitalization error at the beginning. Come on Ziggler.