IE #2: Writing for Local NPR Stations

As a followup to last week's Information Exchange about how to write for National Public Radio, this segment is how to market your book by capturing local and regional audiences by writing for NPR affiliate stations.

The first step is to brainstorm the regional slants of your book. Then you go to NPR's list of affiliate stationsto find all the stations within those local and regional markets. Most will offer you the chance to write a commentary about your subject.

Say you're marketing a cookbook of Texas barbecue recipes. You could write a commentary for a Dallas station that reminisces about your family's Fourth of July barbecues and encourages people to keep up such traditions. Or if you've written a mystery series that takes place in the antebellum South, you could write related commentaries for stations in that region.

My local NPR affiliate, KQED in San Francisco, offers a program called Perspectives where people can write 375-word commentaries that are aired five times, three on the day they're aired and twice on the following Saturday. Once the material is archived, listeners can visit the web site and listen to the commentaries at any time. That's a lot of publicity.

Do you have questions? Let me know.

CQ #2: The Definition of Specific

Often when we're asked to be specific, we're still too general in our replies.

If someone asks, "What color were her eyes?" we'll say, "Brown." If they ask us how long we've been working at a particular company, we'll say, "About three years." If they ask us to name our favorite hobby, we'll say, "Reading." All the information we've given is accurate. But because the facts are too general, we only impart a fraction of what makes us interesting.

Now imagine we dispense with generalities and become truly specific by explicitly communicating our specialness or distinguishing features:

• "Her eyes were like coffee mixed with a teaspoon of heavy cream."

• "I've been working here since the day after Valentine's Day, 2004, which was the day my former dog trainer, now my husband, called to ask if we could get our dogs together to play."

• "I can't get into pop culture so I mainly read pre-twentieth century mythology, song stories and drama, like of Yuan and Ming."

As soon as we become more specific, our writing becomes much richer. The same is true when writing about our characters: the more accurate we are about their likes, dislikes and what they know, the more they'll come alive for our readers.

To learn how to be more specific, start reading lists of minutia that will give you a feel for the level of detail necessary to capture readers' attention and convince them of your character's credibility:

Baseball Minutia

Food Facts and Bizarre Trivia for the Martha Stewart Impaired

Schooner Vocabulary

BQTP #1: Are you a treasure hunter?

I had to pick up my son today from school, because it's raining here in Northern California. I parked in front of a chain-link fence and waited, my mind rifling through the items on my to-do list. Something caught my eye and I found myself staring at the fence. Because the links were shaped like diamonds, the rainwater pooled at the lowest point of each. The clouds had moved away and the sun shone from behind, turning the trapped droplets of water into thousands of glittering marbles of rainbow sheen.

Such fabulous sights remind me that my first goal as a writer is to to gather treasures — images, scents, moments and movements — because those are what make my writing rich. To gather such trinkets, however, I have to be open to observation, which means pulling out of to-do-list mode and opening myself to what's happening right here, right now at this particular moment.

So my question is, do you make the time and effort to observe your surroundings, not only in order to enjoy your life more, but to fill your chest with writing treasures? If you can, I'd love to know how you clear your mind for the task.

Not quite so accomplished? Here are a two web sites that can help:

Find it! Visual Puzzle Tests Your Observation Skills

Unblock By Exercising Your Observation Skills

WW #2: Increase Your Vocabulary

Welcome to the second week of Growing Great Writers From the Ground Up. Today is Monday, which means starting off the writing week with an exercise to agitate the gray matter of the brain. And what better way is there to shake up the "nerve cell bodies, glial cells, capillaries and short nerve extensions/processes at the surface of the cerebral hemispheres and cerebellum" (Wikipedia) than to expand our vocabulary?

Today's exercise, then, is to look up the meanings to the following three words and write one sentence for each. And rather than write a purely functional sentence, embrace the vocabulary word so it becomes a story in itself. For a humorous example of what I mean, see a few of my attempts at the bottom of this web page.

Besides increasing your vocabulary, this exercise is a great way to generate story ideas. If words are interesting enough, they can provide the tone, subject matter and even time period necessary for a great short story or essay. Once you begin thinking in these terms, you'll come to see the dictionary as a gold mine of ideas.

Now for the words: 1. kakemono, 2. slipstream, and 3. defalcate.

If you get a chance, share your results, funny, tragic or otherwise. And since you love words — what writers don't? — here are a few great word web sites:

The Best Words

Building a Better Vocabulary

Vocabulary.com