Writing with attitude

There's a good reason why stand-up comics communicate so much better with their audiences than newspaper reporters do with theirs. They have attitude. Their stories have a point. They're just not sharing everything they've managed to find out about the life cycle of butterflies.

One proviso. While it's great to have attitude (by which we mean a passionate point of view), we don't want so much to hear your attitude as that of the people you're writing about. It takes a lot of research, but you'll know you've hit the jackpot when you can say with certainly not only what your characters did, but also how they felt about it.