100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Show your opinion
Eleven ways to make people like what you write

Few things are duller than a man or woman without an opinion. Your opinion is not always appropriate, but often it is the thing that gives writing its life and color. In fact, it is frequently dishonest to hide your opinion because it will find its way into your writing anyhow by influencing your choice of what material to include and what to ignore.

I often color my stories with my opinion. I think it makes for more interesting writing. But I try to be fair, also. If I put my opinion into the story, I also include opinions of people who don’t agree with me.

Below is the lead for an article I wrote about hitchhiking for the Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, MA). There’s nothing secret about my view of the subject: it’s all over the piece. But in that article I also included the views of policemen, parents, kids, and drivers.

By any rational standard, the idea of hitchhiking—good Samaritanism in its purest form, people helping people, etc.—should be a good thing.

And yet if you stop any ten people on the street and ask them about hitchhiking, you will hear the darkest sort of fumblings. You will hear that hitchhiking is a bad thing.

Hitchhikers are muggers, you will hear, they are thieves and rapists. And if they are not, then they are fair and fragile prey for an army of savage cretins that haunts our highways. Either way, so the story goes, when hitchhiking takes place, someone is scheduled to end up in a shallow roadside grave bludgeoned into oblivion by some highway lunatic.

With over 30,000 hitchhiking miles behind me, and perhaps another 10,000 miles of driving hitchhikers, I was anything but objective about this. It rankled me to the core that society had become so concerned about hitchhiking, and I was convinced that hitchhiking, like apartment living and late night walks, had been sensationalized all out of whack by TV and movies. Every time a hitchhiker shows up on TV, you can bet somebody is finished.

By including my opinion in the article, I gave the reader a basis for discussion, either with other people or in his own mind. Even if the reader says, “I totally disagree,” I have made him or her think about my subject. I have accomplished my goal. I don’t care if the reader agrees with my opinion. The important thing is that he or she respond to it. If you can stir your reader up, then your writing has achieved some success.