By Jeffrey Hedquist
Good radio writers are good storytellers. Try spending the 5 to 20 minutes you have set aside to do your writing each day and create a different kind of story. Write a drama, a sports story, an adventure, a humor piece, whimsy or a fairytale. Try writing a first person account, a third person account, a news story. The possibilities are almost endless.
Practice writing from different points of view, just as you write commercials for different representative audiences. You might get as specific as writing a 60 second commercial a day for an existing or imaginary client, but that’s not the purpose of the exercise. The purpose of the exercise is to strengthen your creative muscles.
Keep your daily writing in a safe place, even organized by subject. You can put this in a series of folders, a notebook, or on your hard drive, filed by subject and cross-referenced. Because at some point in the future, you are going to need an idea or a concept or an idea starter, or a way to break writer’s block. And this repository of daily ideas and creations can be your source of inspiration, a place you can go, a bank of work that you can draw upon.
The inspiration from your daily writing can come from anywhere: your health, the weather, an idea that came to you in the shower; something you saw in the newspaper, or heard on radio or TV, or saw in a movie; a book you’ve read, or a comment someone may have made; an email you may have gotten, or a conversation you had with a friend; a remembrance or recognition of something from your childhood. Again, it doesn’t need to be more than 5 or 20 minutes, but it should be 5 or 20 minutes of concentrated writing. And, by writing I mean putting the pen to paper, and not stopping, simply writing just to get the flow of words going.
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© 2002 Hedquist Productions, Inc.