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About Writing Right: The Blog

Liability Insurance for Journalists

Been sued lately for $50 million for libel? One writer was, pointing out the obvious: without insurance, today's journalist is putting himself in jeopardy. Here's the full story from CJR.

[Columbia Journalism Review] - REPORTER YASHAR ALI in August found himself in a difficult situation for any journalist, let alone a freelancer. He was hit by a lawsuit from Fox News host Eric Bolling seeking a whopping $50 million in damages. The suit followed a story by Ali in the HuffPost that alleged the television personality had texted unsolicited photos of male genitalia to at least three colleagues.

Ali stood by his story, and so did HuffPost. Shortly after it ran, Fox suspended Bolling, and in September, the network announced he would be leaving the network “amicably.”
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Creating "Round" Characters

Think about one of your favorite classic stories in fiction. Something you enjoyed reading more than anything else as a child, over and over again. Was it Alice in Wonderland? Treasure Island? Black Beauty?

Now, ask yourself why you enjoyed reading that story so much. The answer is nearly always the same. The main characters.

Characters are what the reader identifies and empathizes with; they are what the reader loves to love ... or hate. Many great stories with weak plots, shoddy descriptive passages, and marginal dialogue have relied for their greatness solely on characterization. If you don't believe me, go back and read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises or The Old Man and the Sea. Papa's works are notoriously weak on story line and only marginal on description and dialogue. Where Hemingway works his magic is through his characters. When he writes about Ezra Pound or Gertrude Stein, about F. Scott Fitzgerald, we develop a love/hate relationship with those characters that is strong enough to keep us coming back, looking for more pages to turn.

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Creating "Flat" Characters

Characterization. The word, itself, strikes fear into the hearts of trembling young novelists. What I'd like to know is ... why?

The characters in your fiction make the whole thing work. It doesn't matter how brilliant a plot you construct or how lively the action. It doesn't mean a thing if you paint the most glowing descriptive passages ever. The whole book isn't worth a tinker's damn if your characterization is flawed. Here's why.

People care about people. Or, at least, they want to. They may love them, they may hate them. But the bottom line is they're empathetic toward them. Even books that have non-people as their characters (remember Christine?) embed those non-humans with human-like characteristics, making them, in effect, people.

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