In our recent User’s News Reader Survey, many of you told us that you had never written for User’s News because you felt that you couldn’t write well enough to be published. That’s a real shame, because if you are reading this magazine, you are part of a community and we would love to hear from as many members of our community as possible — including those of you who have never written before. We don’t care if you can’t spell or have the worst handwriting: we just want you to write to us. This article will try to encourage you to put pen to paper and send us a story, because we reckon that if you can tell your friends a story, then you can write one too.

Before you start

Before you start writing, think of an event in your life that you’d like to tell us about. It can be funny (the time you nodded off at your brother’s wedding), sad (the time DoCS took your child from you) or dramatic (the time you went through customs with an ounce of smack up your rear end).

In order to get the story straight in your mind, boil the entire event down to one sentence. Think of it as a title for your story:

• The best rush I ever had.
• Scoring pure smack in Thailand.
• Hanging out in jail.
• The funniest dope growing scheme ever invented.
• The time I ripped off a narc for $8000.
• The day that DoCS took my baby from me.

Take little bites

Okay, now that you know what you want to write about, you can lay out a structure which will make the story easy to write and interesting to read. It’s often easier to divide the story into little bite-sized sections rather than just starting to write and risk rambling off on a tangent.

You could aim for five sections of about 150-200 words each (that’s about 12 sentences in each section). If a section is longer or shorter that’s totally cool — it’s just a way to get started and stay on track. Write the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 into the left hand column of a page. These are the sections you are going to write. Number 1 is about you introducing yourself to your readers: Call it “About me”, or “Who I am”. Numbers 2, 3 and 4 are your story, and number 5 is your conclusion. Write a sentence or two next to numbers 2, 3 and 4 which describe the ‘arc’ or progress of your story; for example:

1. About me / introduction: Growing up in Dubbo.

2. Went to Thailand in 1986 and stayed on the beach in Pattaya
3. Found a local guy who was dealing pure smack for $20 a gram. Got a massive habit, but had the best time.

4. My money ran out and I had to come back to Australia and went through the worst detox ever.

5. Conclusion: Shame I’m not living on the beach in     Thailand, but I’m glad I don’t have such a massive    habit anymore.

All right — now filling in the sections is just like painting by numbers: let’s look at them one by one.

The introduction: tell us about yourself

Tell us who you are, where you live, what drugs you are into, any other interests you have or what your job is. We can’t see into your life, so paint us a picture. Some writers just present a series of facts like this:

“My name is Joe. I started using pot when I was 12. I left home when I was 15 and started using speed when I was 16.”

That can get a bit boring, because your readers don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling, which makes it hard for them to relate to you. Try adding some description, like this:

“My name is Joe. I grew up around Newcastle, which I liked a lot, because I was really into surfing and swimming. But my parents got divorced when I was 11 and I moved to Dubbo with my mum. I hated Dubbo because I had nowhere to surf and lost contact with all my friends. I started using pot when I was 12 because I started hanging around a bunch of kids who were heavy smokers. I left home when I was 15 because my mum got together with a guy who drank a lot and used to beat me and abuse my mum, which I didn’t want to hang around for. I started using speed when I was 16. It made me feel great and took away all my bad memories of being powerless and pushed around. It made me feel confident and powerful.”

See how the word ‘because’ is peppered all through that section? ‘Because’ is a great way to make things interesting — it prompts you to explain the sentence you just wrote, which adds colour to your story. If you feel stuck for something to say, chuck in a ‘because’ and see what follows!

The story — in sections

Okay, let’s move on to the meaty stuff: your story. Remember, we allocated three of the five sections to this, so you could think of it as three chapters in a book, or a play in three acts. When you made your plan, you would have written down the key sentences for each section, so now you just have to fill in the gaps between those sentences. You might want to write straight through, or start a new page for each section so that you can think about adding more detail later on. If you can get access to a computer, it makes it easier to add and change things later on, but writing on paper is just fine — we don’t care if it’s on the back of a paper bag!

Aim for a dozen sentences for each section and you should come up with a pretty decent group of scenarios. You can leave it like that or if you feel like you’ve still got more to add, just keep on writing. You could even add an extra section, as long as it adds to the general story you are telling.

The conclusion

The conclusion is really important, because it tells people how you feel about your experience, what you’ve learnt, how you’ve changed and who you’ve become. Along with the introduction, where you tell us who you are and where you are from, it shows us how the story you told has affected you.

Also it’s great to try and tell people what your hopes, dreams and plans for the future are. Your story might be about being in jail or down and out on the streets, but that doesn’t mean it has to be one big whinge: take a look at the stories in this issue like Thank God for Methadone, Fate is the Hunter or It’s Not the End of the World (or most stories we publish). They are very different stories from very different people, but they all have really great conclusions which tell us about what the writer is thinking about themselves and their future.

Sending it in

Finished? Congratulations! Now send it in to us: you can email it, fax it or send it in the post. Don’t forget to add your name and address (so we can contact you if we publish your story) and let us know if you want to use a pen-name to stay anonymous. If your story is published, we pay 13 cents per published word.

We can’t promise to publish everything we receive, but if you follow the steps above, you’ll be in with a bloody good chance! And anyway, the greatest pleasure of writing is in doing it for yourself.

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Comments (1)

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written by Jacinta Barrow , September 16, 2012

Thanks for writing the above. It's hard to know where to start with something like this however your directions above have made it easier to consider doing it. Now it's a case of remembering some of experiences I've had & there has been many over the years. Anyway, thanks again

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