Breaking news…
There’s a tendency to over hype everything these days. I realized this as I watched Headline News from the check out line at Walmart. If I recall correctly, the breaking news was something about the President pardoning a twelve year old girl… from her last day of school.
Seriously? That’s breaking news? Maybe in the sense that it just took place, but it’s certainly not highly significant.
And of course, I tied it back to writing. Every time I see “breaking news” lately, it seems to mark an over-promise/under-deliver scenario. Roughly the equivalent of saying “I have the most important piece of information you will ever hear: shoes have laces.” Wow. Talk about underwhelming. It’s so underwhelming, it might leave me just plain whelmed.
I want to be careful not to do that to my readers. It’s hard too, because I have a tendency to feel like things are more important than they actually are. But, if I can’t deliver on the promise that my headline makes, or my intro makes, or whatever it happens to be, I probably shouldn’t be writing it anyway.
