EMS MAGAZINE.com

EMS MAGAZINE.com: "The Write Stuff: Telling EMS Stories
By Brent Braunworth
A review of Brent Braunworth's book, Blood, Guts and Tears: True Stories of Courage, appeared in the June 2001 issue of EMS Magazine. In the following article, Brent shares some tips on how to get published.
One of my reasons for becoming a firefighter/paramedic, aside from saving lives and property, and helping people, was because of the great stories that could be told. Let's face it, every one of us in our business has been at a party or some social gathering and had some regular Joe ask, 'Hey, were you on that call?' or, perhaps, 'Have you ever been on a call like that?' And when we answer, what happens? All eyes are on us, and all ears are turned in our direction. Total silence, just like E.F. Hutton.
I look at writing as simply putting a 'good story' down on paper. Now, if you already have a 'good story,' so much so that when you tell the story people listen and seem interested, then I figure that's 95% of the battle of writing. Ask any newspaper reporter, and he or she will tell you that getting the story is the hard part, not writing it.
So, if you have a good story, what's next? Transferring it to paper. This article is about how I started.
There's no doubt I had a need to write (I wrote my first, still unpublished novel at age 14), but that doesn't mean that everyone has to sit in a dark, locked room, typing away and poring over manuscripts all night, night after night, to be a writer. Maybe you're interested in trying a short type of story and don't know how to get started. What I did was get some adventure-style books and stories similar to what I thought I might like to write. Back then, I read a lot of Joseph Wambaugh, figuring the police genre was similar to a firefighter's. Af"