When going into making a wikiHow article, the hardest upfront challenge was picking a topic. There are seemingly endless articles on wikiHow on everything. Everything from recipes to repairs to more abstract personality pieces all exists on wikiHow. Finding a unique topic to write about that hasn’t already been covered was the first struggle.
The topic for the article was whittled down to being: How to Write Fiction Quickly. There were already a couple articles on the broad writing/publishing process, but not a single one on the specific habits and tips to be more productive as an aspiring writer. It’s a topic worth cover, and something plenty of aspiring and struggling writers can utilize.
Next was the outline. The topic of how to write fiction quickly involves a lot of isolated mentalities, habits, and practices that don't exactly fit into a neat sequential order. The ten steps in the article were organized based on importance and were written to lead into and build off of one another. For example, the “Set time aside” step is about scheduling writing time in the day, followed by the “Set goals” step which then explains how to set a word count for each day. The one leads into the next, and this is very obvious in the way the photos are presented. The same is done with the “Eliminate distractions” step and the “Get lost in the story” step. Both can exist independently of each other and can go anywhere in the one to two-step list, but they've put together to emphasize one another and to put emphasis on the later more important steps.
Next was the photoshoot for the article and this was far and away from the most challenging aspect of the project. The topic was fun to write about, but a real challenge to visualize. A lot of what goes into writing fiction quickly is a mentality. It’s hard to visualize a mentality or mental process. To get around this, many of the photos are of pen on paper. This is appropriate and useful since pen on paper is thematically tied to the topic at hand, and it’s an effective way to communicate the intangible and nonvisual. An example of this is the “Conquer the marathon of the middle” step. The step is about how most writers get stuck after their first act and don’t know how to build to their climax once everything is set up. The solution is to keep things interesting and to create conflict and drama along the way. Conflict and drama that develops and changes in ways that should surprise the audience and characters. Now how do you capture that in a picture? The final idea was to draw out the typical story structure with a rise in action from the intro to the climax, with a label written “marathon.” This showcases the problem and solution in an easy to digest visual, but it wasn’t easy coming up with the picture idea.
When actually writing out the article, the greatest challenge was to keep the language in the objective first-person. It’s a topic based on personal experience being communicated to an individual person, so refraining from saying “I, me, you, etc.” was difficult.
Coding was also a hurdle to jump through, but once attention was paid to every detail and every character, it proved to be manageable.
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