ACW Writers' Day, 10 March, in Derby... And a New Competition

by Rosemary Johnson

• How would you pitch an article to an editor, in such a way that he/she could not resist taking it? 
• Could you sum up your article in a sentence?  A paragraph?  Two paragraphs?
• What would you be expected to include in your article?  Who? What? Where? When?
• What do you know about the inverted pyramid?
• Could you write a headline?
• How would you carry out an interview?

We were very lucky to have speaking to us, at the ACW Writers’ Day in Derby last Saturday (10 March), Sam Hailes, editor of Premier Christianity magazine, and Claire Musters, a regular contributor Premier Christianity and to many other Christian publications.  Many of us think of ourselves as fiction writers, and struggle when required to tackle non-fiction, but the reality is that all writers need to turn their hand to writing press pieces at some time, even if only to raise their profile, or to promote their books.  

Sam and Claire talked to us about structure of press articles and pitching, use of images and quotes.  Quotes should always be included – you will note that I have done so in this blog post.  They discussed research and the need to get names right.  I admit that I checked, and double-checked, the spelling of Claire’s name – with an ‘I’.  Very few writers can rattle off an article just like that.  Editing has to be carried out repeatedly and will take a long time and a lot of effort.  All journalists must be prepared to cut, ruthlessly, even if what we’ve written is beautiful, meaningful and informative.  As Claire said, we should ask ourselves, ‘How can we provoke a deep response from the reader?’ 

We were also given the chance to write a pitch for an article for Premier Christianity - in the space of just fifteen minutes.  Oh, Sam and Claire, I can’t write so fast!  Thinking up an idea within that time slot was bad enough.  Those who wrote the most interesting pitches will be invited to write them up as articles for the magazine.  Later, we interviewed a colleague and were interviewed ourselves.  To my surprise, because I’m not good at the talking stuff, this came much easier.  I recalled what Sam had said earlier, that, ‘The listener wants to hear about the person being interviewed, not about the interviewer’.  Many celebrities forget this. 

The big event for me last Saturday (seeing as I'm ACW Competitions Manager) was the launch of our next ACW competition, this time for journalism.  A thousand-word article, please, on a topic which is current at the time you are writing.  The deadline isn’t until 31 August 2018, so we expect many different topics.  More information is available in Christian Writer and on the ACW Website.  The first and second-placed winners will receive book tokens (£25 and £10) and the winning entry will be published in the ACW journal, Christian Writer (circulation about 700).  However, as there can only be one winner, we ask entrants, on the cover sheet (to be downloaded from the website) to state where they would pitch their entry. 

Thank you, Sam and Claire, for a very interesting day.

Rosemary Johnson has had many short stories published, in print and online, amongst other places, The Copperfield Review, Circa and Every Day Fiction.  In real life, she is a part-time IT tutor, living in Suffolk with her husband and cat.  Her cat supports her writing by sitting on her keyboard and deleting large portions of text.