Writing & Publishing

 

Kathryn and Jeff - A Case Study

 

Follow two individuals, Kathryn and Jeff, as they journey along their path to becoming better writers. Their situations may resonate with you and shed more light on the importance of the imagination in writing.

 

Kathryn – Fiction 

 

Kathryn teaches sixth grade at an elementary school in North Seattle. She enjoys reading Tolkien’s works and discussing them with her husband during their free time. Lately Kathryn has been thinking about writing her own fantasy novel, but she is nervous about her writing skills.

 

One day after a spending some time in her garden, Kathryn musters up the courage to write her fantasy novel. It is an epic that depicts the classic battle of good versus evil. She imitates aspects of Tolkien’s writing along the way - the trees talk just like the Ents in Middle Earth.

 

But when she gives a draft of her story to her husband to read, he is critical! He says that having the trees talk is ‘not believable’ and that – while fun – it doesn’t fit in Kathryn’s world like Tolkien’s because there are no elves to waken the trees. He complains that talking trees are an odd anomaly and a burdensome strain on the imagination.

 

Jeff – Non-Fiction

 

Jeff, on the other hand, owns a whisky distillery in a little Wisconsin town. He really wants a new bill to pass in the state legislature allowing liquor to be sold in grocery stores, This way his company can reach a wider market. Jeff likes to write and has sent several articles over the years to the local newspaper for publication. He is disappointed because none of his articles have been published yet.

 

Jeff, like Kathryn, musters up the courage one day and makes a valiant effort to write a well-researched and well-argued article supporting the new liquor legislation. He researches the best economic arguments available online and systematically explains them. He even drafts a personal note to the editor to accompany his article (they went to high school together).

 

But the next week Jeff gets the article back with a friendly note from the editor telling him they didn’t have space to publish it. The arguments are good, but they read a bit like an economics book and will go over the heads of readers. He advises Jeff to think about the day-to-day impacts members of the local community will feel.

 

Imagine and Persuade

 

Where do Kathryn and Jeff go wrong? Both of them struggle taking ideas and translating them into new contexts for new audiences – the same stumbling block we identified in the first page of this section.

 

Kathryn doesn’t sufficiently consider how to incorporate Tolkien’s ‘talking trees’ into her imaginative world. She doesn’t stop to think that some readers may want an explanation for how the talking trees came about, and that her job as a writer is to persuade the reader to believe in her world. As a result, there is a hollow ring about her world, a missing link that makes her story not ‘believable’ to her husband.

 

Jeff makes the assumption that good arguments exist ‘hidden’ in the world, and he needs to find them and uncover them like an archeologist, careful not to ‘damage’ them during the process. But in so doing, he fails to sufficiently imagine how his arguments should be applied to the local community’s context. His arguments remain hanging in the air, in an abstract mode, and never reach the ground where his readers are.

 

While Kathryn struggles to persuade her audience about talking trees, Jeff struggles to imagine how his research applies in a new context.

 

 

 

These two words persuade and imagine are vital to translating ideas into new contexts for new audiences.

 

They are really two sides of the same coin. As we seek to write compelling fiction stories (in Kathryn’s case) or articulate the arguments we discover (in Jeff’s case), we create new language in a new context by way of our imagination, and the more persuasive it is the better.

 

Together they form the backbone of what the ‘Writing Practice’ section of the webpage seeks to teach. The next two tabs on the bottom of this page, offer tools to help you practice writing with your imagination to persuade your audience.