Many believe that good writers are able to just turn their pen to any kind of writing but this really isn’t the case. There are some incredible writers out there like Roger Wolfson, who have built a career on their ability to be creative across the entire field of writing. Throughout his career he has been a speech writer, a scriptwriter, an author a political analyst and an essayist who has consistently won praise for his ability to chop and change between different writing styles.
If you are a good writer and you wish to be ambidextrous with regards to where you can dedicate those skills, then the key is to first ensure that you are ready to work on the skills which are required to do so.
Understanding Form
Writing a story and writing an essay are two completely different things and the key change between both styles is the length. Understanding how to write long and short form, and how to still be able to deliver the point accurately and succinctly is a skill which so few of us possess. The reality is that some people are more wordy than others, and that means that timing the word count down and being able to deliver the clear message which you would like to, that is a skill which you have to work on.
Evoking Emotion
If we take two areas of writing such as scriptwriting and speechwriting, then we can see quite in both cases that the idea of evoking emotion is something that is critical to both. With this being said however there are stark contrasts between the two, and the skill is knowing who your audience is and what kind of emotions you are looking to draw out. In a script you are using a character to bring about emotion, so it needs to be real and raw and natural. Conversely when you are writing a script, the majority of that emotion comes not from the speech giver, but from the words which they have in front of them. The key here is to learn how to use characters and words to draw emotion, and how to separate them.
Reporting Speech
We use reported speech in a wide range of situations in writing and the way in which you do it will be critical to the success of your project. Writing speech in a newspaper article is not the same as you do in a script, and that is different from how you would do in a story. What writers do is take the correct amount of speech and create it in a certain way which helps to back up the story which we are telling. In even the world of journalism, this is not about taking speech verbatim, but selecting the right areas of speech to use, to deliver a solid story.
These are the fundamental skills which writers will need to then cross boundaries with their work.
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