Write Your Fiction as if You are in the Middle of a Raging Storm

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. Anaïs Nin

Sean P. Durham
6 min readApr 8, 2024

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Every day, I read a lot of non-fiction. I’ll read a book about sailors who traversed the most dangerous waters in the world and survived by their wits and knowledge of the sea. It’s inspiring. Sometimes, non-fiction about adventures of the human spirit are the best self-help books available.

Other days, I’ll read a little of the news. Apparently, it’s non-fiction. I’ve learned how important it is to read the news with a critical eye, careful to look for the catch in the story. The critical point that seems to be biased towards a particular party, a nation, or person — the person or country that we’re supposed to root for.

The news piece is often constructed to sway opinion, the truth is subjective, and the events that took place — such as a war, a murder, a theft, are nothing but a vehicle to express the propaganda needed to keep us second guessing. What really happened is anybody’s guess.

If the news writer is seasoned enough to get the writing just right, they’ll trick the reader’s mind into…

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