Persuasive Writing by DL Larson

Persusasive writing can be filled with statistics, but many readers have become skeptical, knowing stats can be manipulated and the message muddled. Research is another avenue used in persuasive writing, but it too can be twisted with half truths and unreliable sources. Storytelling, a human interest tidbit may well be the way to go when wanting to make a point.

The following story is an old one, remade and shortened, and it delivers a point of view the reader may or may not agree with, but the important part is it compells the reader to absorb the persuasive message.

The story:
A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. She considered herself a liberal and in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs to redistribute the wealth in the country. She was rather upset her father held a different view. She had participated in class discussions and listened to professors explain their reasonings of fair distribution regarding the needs of the people.

One day she challenged her father on his opposition to higher taxes and more government programs. He in turn asked how her classes were going. Thinking he was trying to change the subject she quite adamently told him she was working hard and holding a 4.0 GPA. It was tough keeping her grades up with such a heavy course load. She studied every day and spent very little time partying like other people she knew. She didn't have time for a boyfriend, and had only made a small group of friends who worked as hard as she did.

Her father nodded in understanding and asked, "How is your friend Audrey doing in school?"

"She's barely getting by. She takes only easy classes, never studies and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. But she is popular and thinks college is a blast. She's always invited to these great parties and then misses class because she stays out so late."

The father then said, "Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct 1.0 of your GPA and give it to Audrey. Then you will both have a 3.0 GPA. That would be a generous and equal distribution to someone who sounds as if they could use a little help."

The daughter, visibly upset replied, "That's crazy! And so unfair! I've worked hard for my grades. I've invested a lot to time and effort to keep my GPA. Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She's playing while I've worked my tail off."

The father smiled a bit and said gently, "Welcome to the conservative side of thinking!"


Persuasion techniques are valuable tools every writer needs. Share with us on how you have manipulated a plot with persuasive methods.

Til next time ~

DL Larson

The Mystical, Magical Moments in Creative Writing

OCD perhaps how we writers keep on writing in the face of defeat after defeat. I am reminded of the song lyric, "When my smallest of dreams won't come true..." We are accused of being dreamers and how can we not be just that? Our stock in trade is our dreams, our imaginations, our visions, those voices so demanding within us, in our hearts and in our heads, demanding to be released out into the world, and we visualize it all from the outset to the finish line as one perfect set of characters aligned with a perfect plot in the perfect setting be it aboard a doomed ship, in a wooded dale, in a dark and sinister city of our creation and sifted through the five senses and sometimes the sixth sense of our character(s).

Writing is in effect a huge leap of faith. Think of it, you set out with a single phrase, a single sentence, hoping it will lead to a single paragraph, knowing all the while that you are committing yourself to months, perhaps years of hard labor despite its being a labor of love. What motivates us to put down that first word in the building of yet another novel after the first? How do we ever manage to go on to the second and beyond that?

It really truly helps to thoroughly know your character(s), particularly those who can carry the weight of successive books on their shoulders as they make the new title a good deal easier to get into as you KNOW this ensemble so well from your having lived with them through a previous novel, previous perils and adventures. You get to know them often better than you know any real person.

Still what makes us driven to write and write again, despite the overwhelming odds. "Never tell me the odds, kid," says Han Solo to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. If we were to dwell on the odds of actually completing a novel, and then actually finding anyone who'd care to publish it, and then any audience willing to pay good money for it....would we ever begin?  Is it really about that or is there some deeper, even cosmic reason behnd WHY...why we write?

Frankly, for me, I suspect it is  genetic--yes, all in the heredity of the born storyteller whose gift at birth then is nourished and allowed to flourish. If I could look into a crystal ball not at the future but at the past, would I find my Uncle John there, the great oral storyman looking back at me? What of a grandfather, a great grandfather in the old homeland of Scotland? And before that...in the time of the first men to sit about a campfire and retell events of the hunt?  Something in a story wants telling, needs telling, and needs people like you and me to hear it and hear it well, and to demand it be told well.

Voices out of the past, voices in the present, voices out of the future infiltrate a storyteller's mind and they all demand a hearing, and so it goes...we are OCD about getting all the stories we hear in our heads outside of us and on paper. We have little choice otherwise. The whole damn thing is mystical, and the older a storyteller gets, the more mystical the process becomes.

Robert W. Walker, author of Titanic 2012, Children of Salem, and more...