Blog Inspiration

As a creative writing blogger these past several weeks, I've found it difficult to give people challenges as well as inform on how certain practices can strengthen writing.

I wish I'd looked at more blogs before I started because I found this one, called "The Write Practice," which gives info not only on how to improve upon your writing, but also does day-to-day writing guides to accompany their challenges.

They also get into things like villain archetypes and how to write about dysfunctional families in traditional ways.

The layout is also very clean, and easy to read, and list-like titles make information digestible and interesting.

Here is a screenshot from their homepage, which demonstrates these qualities.

For color inspiration, I got a lot of color inspiration from this palette called "hero" by colourlovers. 

Because writing can be a stress-inducing task, I think that it's important for the color scheme to combat those feelings of stress, and I really liked this color palette because it was filled with green and neutral tones. 

Because serif fonts are easier to read than non-serif fonts, I drew my inspiration from the newspaper I worked on (I really like the Rocket if anyone couldn't tell). The header of the Rocket is in minion pro, as is the body text, and I am particularly fond of the graduation issue we just produced, which can be found here. 

I think the reason these fonts work so well together (and especially in the case of a writing blog) is because they're readable, but vary enough to keep them interesting. 

The header is more modern and is sans serif, and the title is reminiscent of news type, which I've always been a fan of. I'm not usually a fan of script font, but I think this one works simply because it offsets the serious tone of the other two fonts.  

Editorializing, "I think you should do this"

The most important idea behind journalism is the myth of objectivity, that is, removing yourself entirely from the story and telling only what happened. 

As a journalist, I know that true objectivity doesn't exist because choosing to cover one event over another, and even choosing who to interview can shape your story into one that is entirely different from a story where you'd interviewed different people. 

This week, you should take a news story where you read it and thought, "oh, that's terrible," or "oh, that's really interesting," and talk about your reaction within the story. 

Doing this will help you describe feelings and emotions in your stories and hitting them at the core. Sometimes writers get into traps where they don't explore the interesting and terrible sides of human emotions. 

Here's an interesting story from my school's newspaper about a professor who sued the university on gender discrimination-- he's a man. I'll let you take it from there. 

http://www.theonlinerocket.com/news/2014/09/04/male-professor-claims-discrimination/