17 Hours

Writing about sports is enthralling at times. Other times it is used as a mechanic to release your anger about something that is creeping on your nerves (perhaps the BCS system in college football).

It’s a great tool if you’re a writer wanting to get your thoughts out onto the web for people to read because speculation is open and debates are welcome (usually). Debating about sports can either be fun or futile. Fun being if you’re debating two teams strengths and weaknesses, futile being if you’re debating whether a player from a different position is better than the other.

But most people don’t understand how to write about sports.

Sportswriting — you write about sports and you leave yourself out. I know I don’t follow that a lot on here, but I can do it with ease if I want to. This being a blog, it’s not a professional website so to speak, as thoughts are recorded with several “I’s.” If you’re looking into being a sportswriter, you will have to avoid that.

Sportswriters are prolific. There’s a lot of sports news websites, and if you write for them, a lot of times it’s not going to be one blog a day — oh, no, it’s going to be more like five blogs a day, more-so because news around the sports world is like billions of atoms flying around. You learn to write fast and efficient. I think that’s why I have already written so many blogs for 17 Hours — I’m used to writing several posts at a torrid pace. This is a good thing and a bad thing (good because the site is receiving more content; bad because it could be more intermittent — but the good still outweighs the bad here).

You can’t be a writer without reading a lot and writing a lot, so you can’t expect to do anything less when you want to become a sportswriter, so don’t just think that all you have to do is have your eyes glued to the television screen all day to post some incoherent thoughts on the web about sports.

You have to be powered by crafty, sharp prose and have a knack for grabbing reader’s attention either in the lead or in the first paragraph. If you can’t do that, you’re done with an article, as most people won’t bother to read on if you don’t hook them like a fish in one of the starting sentences of your article.

Read anything and everything. I did. I kept reading everything no matter what it was from books to billboards. “Huh? Billboards?” Yes, billboards; I wanted to compact so many words into my mind because at the end of the day it would pay off and I would end up having a carousel of words to choose from when writing. I’ve read a lot and I’ve written a lot, and I’m still not done — I’ll never be done.

Avoid jargon and cliches. Back up your arguments with facts. Don’t talk down to the reader unless it’s a style of yours, but it only works if you’re comical.

If you write now, with no experience under your belt, your writing will be tenuous. However, if you make the strenuous efforts to become better, you will appreciate it in the long run.