The Free-lancer's Paradigm

by Tom Williams

The free-lancer's paradigm is the most basic of writing tools—the writer's equivalent of the carpenter’s hammer and saw. Use the paradigm, and your books and articles hang together as never before. The reader is drawn into and through them, in a steady progression from beginning, through middle to end. You are finally writing good, readable stuff. Neglect the paradigm and you are likely to pay a price in missed opportunities and articles that can’t find a publisher.

For many years I published regional magazines and weekly newspapers. To help these beginning writers whip their material into shape for these traditional "break-in" markets, I explain to them that anecdotes and personal experiences are the life-blood of readable articles. I put the structure basic to all good non-fiction writing into "one-two-three" form and gave it a name: the "freelancer's paradigm." Results were almost immediate. Marginal articles suddenly became publishable articles.

The Paradigm is a Pattern
The freelancer's paradigm is a simple pattern, but it is a very important pattern. It works the way our minds work, moving effortlessly from the general to the particular, leading the reader on with effective story-telling.

The paradigm consists of three parts:

1. a general observation, statement of fact or question;

2. followed by a narrowing of focus to a single example;

3. followed by an anecdote, a quote, or both.

The better and more experienced the writer, the more invisible and seamless the paradigm becomes. In the hands of a seasoned pro, it is open to virtually infinite variation. But in whatever form it exists, it is always there.

Magazine Gold
The paradigm is basic to successful magazine articles. The magazine non-fiction article is a highly compressed form: in the space of 1500 to 2500 words the writer must hook the reader, lead him through the article easily and enjoyably, and teach him something useful — all served up with a liberal helping of human interest. The paradigm enables you do this. It throws open the stylistic windows and lets the fresh air of personal, one-on-one experience waft through your narrative.

In a recent article for Publishing for Entrepreneurs magazine, for example, I wanted to get across the idea that anyone with imagination and energy can make money publishing advertising-based local and regional publications. I could have started my article a very matter-of-fact way:

"Periodical publishing on the local and regional level can be quite lucrative. Publishers of tabloids, city magazines and tourism guides regularly make incomes of $100,000 a year and more. Today the typesetting and page layout capabilities of desktop publishing have put such projects within the reach of any entrepreneur who will take the trouble to learn to use them. Statistics reveal...."

and so on.

Instead, I opted for the paradigm:

"Periodical publishing on the local and regional level is easy to get into and quite lucrative. I went into business five years ago with a Mac Plus, two used desks and a laser writer. This year my company will gross $800,000. Next year we expect to top $1,000,000. What I did, you can do too."

General observation; particular example and anecdote (the sales record). This paradigm-based lead not only tells the story, but whets the reader's appetite for the details to come. The facts are there in both versions, but the paradigm translates them into the language of personal experience and makes them come alive.

Here's another paradigm from the same article:

"Can anyone succeed? Yes, if you have the energy and ambition to do so. "I never believed I could bring out my own newspaper," says Lance Dunn, of Richmond, Virginia. proud publisher of a new weekly. "Your book gave me the details, and look at me now!"

The paradigm is not flashy or dramatic. It just works. After my article was published, visits to my web site (mentioned in a tag at the end of the article) zoomed and sales of my book on periodical publishing peaked at a level five times greater than before.

The Backbone of Non-Fiction Books
Here's another paradigm, this time from How to Publish Your Poetry, a book I wrote a few years ago.

"If the opportunity to publish your poetry is what you want, remember that opportunity doesn't do the knocking, you do. In his classic manual, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill tells how he got the job he set his mind on. 'I applied in the regular way,' Hill recalls, 'and didn't get hired. I then sent a follow-up letter every week for four weeks. When that failed l sent a letter every day. Finally l sent a telegram every hour for two days. At the end of this time l got a call. "Come on in to work," the voice said. "We give up. The job is yours."' "

And I concluded:

"While l do not recommend this degree of overkill in approaching editors—who will not have the time to deal with all these inquiries—it is essential to develop a marketing plan appropriate to your goal of getting your poetry published and implement it relentlessly."

Paradigms all, pure and simple.

Some books are virtually nothing but paradigms. This is particularly true of the classic best-sellers of salesmanship and motivation. Think and Grow Rich, Zig Ziglar's See You at the Top, W. Clement Stone's Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People all fit into this category. So do more recent titles such as Wayne Dyer's Your Erroneous Zones and, on a somewhat more intellectual level, M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled.

Here's what you, as a writer, need to remember about such books:

1. They communicate easily and directly, because they are...

2. Paradigm-based, putting their lessons into easy-to-remember paradigm form.

3. And, as a result, they are powerful best-sellers.
   

The Nightly News
The paradigm is everywhere. The nightly news could not survive without the paradigm, which moves effortlessly from the general observations of the news anchor to the particular and the inevitable sound bite from the individual reporter in place. "Nature is a powerful adversary," Peter Jennings entones from his New York studio. "When disasters come no one can withstand them. The people of Argus, Oklahoma, learned this first hand this afternoon as a devastating tornado ripped through the town. John Johnson has the details," Jennings then asks "John, what are things like in Argus tonight?"

Reporter Johnson appears on the screen, standing before a wrecked mobile home park. "Peter, the people hear are just trying to asses the damage and begin to pick up the pieces." He turns to a distraught woman standing beside him. "Mrs. Wiggs, you have lived right here for five years. Now your home is gone. What are you going to do?"

"We'll just have to go on living the best way we can," Mrs. Wiggs says bravely. "That's all we can do."

Here the paradigm moves from the general (Nature's Power) to the human, flesh and blood particulars of Mrs. Wiggs's cabbage patch and ends with a quote. And it works, every time.

Everybody Uses It—Even Philosophers
The paradigm appears in the most unlikely places, and even the most high-brow authors ignore it at their peril. Take the case of Immanual Kant and Rene Descartes. Kant wrote a monumental tome called the Critique of Pure Reason. Descartes wrote a slim volume called the Discourse on Method. Both writers were brilliant. Both altered the course of the history of ideas. Yet only one of them—Descartes—is widely read, widely quoted, and universally hailed today as the "father of modern philosophy."

Why is this so? It's the paradigm. Kant's book is a dense and virtually impenetrable jungle of thought, a veritable collapsed universe of ideas and analysis.

Descartes, on the other hand, starts out with a first person narrative and a fabulous use of the paradigm:

"I always wondered," Descartes begins, "why mathematicians agreed on everything but philosophers agree on nothing," Descartes begins. "Then one cold winter—it was 1637, I believe—I was holed up in a small room, stoking a pot-bellied stove and trying to keep warm, and I had an idea. What philosophers needed, I decided, was an absolutely universal starting place, a proposition like 'a straight line is the shortest distance between any two points,' But was there any such proposition? I proceeded to doubt every idea in my mind, except for one. I could not doubt that I was doubting. My thought processes prove at least my own existence."

"I think," Descartes concluded, "therefore I am."

This was not just good philosophy. It was also a perfect paradigm.

The Greatest Teachers
The greatest teachers use the paradigm naturally. We scarcely even know how profoundly we are being taught a lesson. We do not think of the lessons of the Bible, for instance, in terms of theological propositions. "What is wisdom?" the writer asks, and follows up the question with the story of King Solomon, the two mothers and the child.

"Where did death and suffering come from?" Well, it seems that in the beginning there was a beautiful garden, and a tree which bore forbidden fruit.....

"What is the sum of all philosophy?" Prince Siddartha asked the greatest scholars in his kingdom. They thought and thought, and finally came up with an answer: "This, too, shall pass."

In every case it is not the idea that the reader remembers, but the flesh-and-blood story that gives it life.

The free-lancer's paradigm is the first and most basic tool of all non-fiction writing. Not all writers are not great writers, but to the degree that they master the tools of the trade — and the freelancer's paradigm is chief among them —we can all become more successful practitioners of our trade.

-- TW
© 1999 Tom Williams, PhD

Dr. Tom Williams is author of 11 non-fiction books and scores of magazine articles in national and regional magazines from Esquire to Writer's Digest. He is the former editor and publisher magazines and community newspapers and is editor-in-chief of his own book publishing company, Venture Press. His two latest books are Kitchen-Table Publisher: How to Make $100,000 a Year Publishing City and Regional Magazines, Weeklies, Shoppers and Guidebooks (5th Edition) and Poet Power: The Practical Poet's Complete Guide to Getting Published and to Self-Publication. For more information, visit his web site at http://www.PubMart.com.