Fuel Your Brain! – R.A. Spratt

When I start work each day, the first thing I do is read the newspapers. I read ABC News, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian, The Washington Post, The Times (of London) and sometimes the Guardian UK. My first job back in the late 90’s was writing jokes for a TV show call ‘Good News Week’. As part of the job we had to read three papers when we got to the office in the morning. It was a great habit that I’ve tried to keep up ever since.

(Me 24 years ago on my first job as a writer. Camera technology was not as good then. There were no filters. If we looked bad in real life, we looked bad in pictures too)

These days I read the newspapers online because it’s cheaper and they are updated more frequently (It’s still fun to read a whole proper newspaper once in a while. I realise my idea of ‘fun’ may differ to most people’s).

(Me today, pointing at my computer, which is where I read the news now)

So why is it good for a writer to read the news?

Basically, you need to fuel your brain. The more ideas and knowledge you can cram in there the better. Knowing lots of stuff will make your writing better and more interesting.

When you read the news you will learn about a lot of stuff wildly different stuff – explosions, natural disasters, disease outbreaks, catastrophic architecture failures (ie. bridges collapsing), strange animals eating people, weird crimes, accidental poisoning, horrendous driving mishaps, the strange antics of the royal family… the list is endless because the news is endless. Any one of these things could trigger an idea that you can use in a story.

Now the papers I listed above are probably a bit heavy going and I know it can be really hard to start reading the paper when you don’t know anything about any of the issues. So a good place to start is with a kid’s news service. You probably know BTN from school and kidsnews.com.au is awesome too.

So that’s my tip for today. Learn about what’s going on in the world. Read the news.

Best wishes,

R.A.