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Challenge #472
May. 21st, 2025 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverToday's challenge is a non-fiction challenge. We tend to think that "writing" means writing a novel or other fiction, but writing non-fiction uses the same skills. Successful non-fiction is not only informative and clear, but also engaging and entertaining.
For your ten minutes today, first, select a subject area that you are very familiar with -- it might be a favorite hobby of yours, or it might be your job, or it might be some subject that you're very interested in and have studied a lot. Now, select a particular focused topic within that subject. Write a few paragraphs explaining that topic to the reader, with a slant toward showing why it's done the way it is.
Remember that you want to keep the reader engaged in your topic just as much as you'd want to keep them engaged in your novel, so use the same skills you use in your fiction writing to bring the topic to life. You might create a character and show them doing the topic, or you might relate an anecdote about someone doing it incorrectly. Or you might relate the historical event that started the topic in the first place.
As an example, if I were writing a book about how to draw blood (the word for this is "phlebotomy", and the person who takes a blood sample at the doctor's office is a "phlebotomist"; no, I have no knowledge about this topic, it's just an example), I might write about the importance of injecting the needle cleanly and hitting the vein well by relating a true story in which my sister had a phlebotomist miss the vein and what they did to try to hit it. I'm not going to write it here, but my sister said it was very painful and left a big bruise.
For your ten minutes today, first, select a subject area that you are very familiar with -- it might be a favorite hobby of yours, or it might be your job, or it might be some subject that you're very interested in and have studied a lot. Now, select a particular focused topic within that subject. Write a few paragraphs explaining that topic to the reader, with a slant toward showing why it's done the way it is.
Remember that you want to keep the reader engaged in your topic just as much as you'd want to keep them engaged in your novel, so use the same skills you use in your fiction writing to bring the topic to life. You might create a character and show them doing the topic, or you might relate an anecdote about someone doing it incorrectly. Or you might relate the historical event that started the topic in the first place.
As an example, if I were writing a book about how to draw blood (the word for this is "phlebotomy", and the person who takes a blood sample at the doctor's office is a "phlebotomist"; no, I have no knowledge about this topic, it's just an example), I might write about the importance of injecting the needle cleanly and hitting the vein well by relating a true story in which my sister had a phlebotomist miss the vein and what they did to try to hit it. I'm not going to write it here, but my sister said it was very painful and left a big bruise.
