Story Like a Journalist

Amber Royer

• Publisher: Golden Tip Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780991408375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Want to write novels that feel real enough to the reader to have been ripped from the headlines, whatever your genre? Think like a journalist. Looking at the questions journalists ask can help you think of the characters and events in your story as real people, whose lives you are recording, just like you were writing memoir or a news article.

Approach planning your novel the way a journalist plans out writing a news piece. They figure out what they will need to research for the piece, and decide how they will structure that research into a narrative. They decide on a format for the story's lede (opening designed to draw the reader in) and structure the story to follow up on the questions presented in that lede. They document everything, so that they can verify the accuracy of everything they present. You can do the same for your fiction.

This workbook serves as a full self-paced writing course, presenting theory on each aspect of the world/characters you are trying to create - and then offering step-by-step worksheets that allow you to apply what you just learned. The instructional material is designed to give you a basic foundation in creative writing craft so that you understand how to build an effective story using the information you add into the worksheets.

Working through the entire collected workbook will give you a comprehensive Story Bible detailing aspects of your plot and characters to give you a reference source for your world - and the expertise on how to use it.

The Master Collection gives you access to all five Story Like a Journalist volumes, for a total of over 100 worksheets. Get ready to take a deep dive into your story, its characters and its world. The journalistic planning strategies in the book take you from determining the best protagonist for your story to imbuing your work with meaning.

The book walks you through each of these processes:

Who? = Character - WHO are these people who've showed up demanding a place in your novel, anyway? You know they have a story to tell, and for some specific reason, you are the writer in the best position to tell it.
Approach uncovering character the same way a journalist approaches a profile piece.

What? = Premise -- WHAT is this story about? Premise define the heart of your story. You need a keystone to hold onto, so you don't get lost in all the things your story COULD be. Premise is your keystone, and it works like the legend for a road map.
Approach refining premise the same way a journalist approaches a news story.

When? and Where? = Setting - WHEN and WHERE the heck are your characters? They have to be somewhere, waiting for the story to start. And that place shouldn't be random. Setting makes the story specific, and allows readers to feel like your characters are real people, living real lives in a certain time and place. Approach exploring aspects of your setting the same way a journalist

Chapter One: Your Story Bible -- The Entry Point to Your Story World

Putting Everything in Order

Approach planning your novel the way a journalist plans out writing a news piece. They figure out what they will need to research for the piece, and decide how they will structure that research into a narrative. They decide on a format for the story’s lede (opening designed to draw the reader in) and structure the story to follow up on the questions presented in that lede. They document everything, so that they can verify the accuracy of everything they present.

Think like a journalist as you build your novel’s Story Bible, a document that organizes everything else about what you will write. Are you ready to get started?

A Journalist Asks: What should I write about? What will readers/viewers be most interested in? What makes this story newsworthy? How should I approach writing it? What elements of the larger topic belong in this story?

A Novelist Asks: What should I write about? What will my readers find interesting about my novel’s idea? What will this novel add to my genre, or say in a new way? How will I approach narration? What am I promising my readers that this story will follow up on?

A Story Bible is a detailed plan for your story. It will help you:

-- Stay on track for building and pacing your novel.

-- Create a reference source full of information about how your story world works, to look at to see connections and spark ideas.

-- Stay consistent as you introduce character traits, character appearance and setting details.

-- Set limits for what plot events CAN happen, so that you can figure out what SHOULD happen.

-- Write a cleanly-plotted first draft that reflects an understanding of your characters from the very beginning.

The first step to designing a Story Bible is to decide on a basic strategy.

Strategies for Building Your Story Bible

Some stories are straightforward, with only a handful of characters and only a few settings. If this is the case, you may be able to do an abbreviated form of a Story Bible. But there are other considerations, such as whether your characters are part of a group with specialized skills and jargon. Think about how complex your story really might be, if you consider all its aspects.

Structure that Won’t Hamper Creativity

Remember: just because you wrote it in the novel plan document, doesn’t mean it’s canon – yet. For a novelist, the Story Bible is in complete flux until the first volume is published. If you come up with better ideas as you write, don’t be afraid to explore them. The planning stage is meant to help you feel like you have a real world to refer to, to give you right answers when you look something up – not to stifle your creativity. Honestly, you’re not likely to follow your initial novel plan completely. The document needs to be updated as details, character relationships, and plot elements change. Try to do this as you write, especially if you start to diverge from your original outline. Otherwise you may have trouble remembering what was part of the original idea, and what is part of the revision.

Approach for Planners

You can work through the Story Bible first – or you can discovery write a chapter or two worth of your initial ideas, come back to the workbook and start filling in the worksheets as they apply to what you want to write next. Either way, keep your Story Bible handy as you work. As you write the draft, add details and statistics to your Story Bible document.

Consistency and accuracy are the key benefits you get from drafting alongside a complete Story Bible. It can also save you time in the long run, because you won’t have to look up small details in the manuscript, such as whether your antagonist’s eyes were green or blue six chapters ago.

Approach for Discovery Writers

It is possible to build a Story Bible after you’ve written your draft. And while it may seem counterintuitive, it can still be beneficial to do the exercises in this workbook after the fact. If you discovery-wrote the manuscript, the sheer act of compiling a Story Bible can help you consider:

-- What possible contradictions do you need to address?
Example: Do your aliens eat insects in chapter 12 or are they vegetarians like you said in chapter 4?

-- Do you have too many characters?
Example: Maybe the protagonist doesn’t need six guy friends, when three serve as sounding boards.

-- What backstory do you need to delve deeper into?
Example: Why exactly did your protagonist cut her mother out of her life? She feels erratic if you don’t tell us.

-- Where might there be plot holes and oversights?

Example: How did your protagonist know that the gun was in the sewer grate? Better go back and foreshadow.

Do You Need A Full Story Bible? Checklist (A-1)

Consider the questions on the checklist to determine if you need a full Story Bible.

Concerns – Put a checkmark by anything you have been trying to improve, or anything that you aren’t sure how to complete.

Aspects – Put a checkmark by features of the novel project you have in mind that might make it more complex.

If you answer yes to a couple of these questions, work through the Story Bible Overarching Worksheet above, which organizes information from the other worksheets in the book to allow you to systematically build a detailed novel plan.

If you answer no to all of the questions, scan through the worksheets under each section and fill out the ones that will help you with your current project.

Where to Keep Your Notes

There’s no right or wrong way to organize – as long as you do organize. Even if you are a discovery writer, there’s a lot to a novel, and you are looking at more consistency re-writes if you try to keep it all in your head than if you lay it out logically.

Paper Notebooks – Keep the notebook on you/your bedside table to record information as you think of it. On one level, novel writing is like building and solving an enormous puzzle at the same time. Pieces of it often come together hours after a productive writing session (along with oversights and conflicts you haven’t yet taken into consideration). Some people prefer paper notebooks for all their projects. I do paper when I need to see info graphically and draw in connections. I also make paper maps.

Notes Applications – You can create a virtual notebook, with a separate note for each topic your Story Bible covers, along with a “to fix” note. There are a number of notes programs, but I like Evernote because it has a free version and I can access the notes on my computer to directly paste things I’ve written into my manuscript file. I prefer to take most of my notes on my phone using this app then delete them after I have updated the manuscript or moved the information into my project wiki.

In-manuscript notes – If I’ve left a gap where I need to add a scene or other information, or I need to do research to verify the history or physics involved, I make a note directly in the manuscript. I highlight these notes, and at the end of the writing session, I address what I can, and then I add any relevant info to my Evernote file. Notes can be made directly in the body of the manuscript, or if you are using Word or a similar word processing software there is a notes feature that allows you to make notes in the margins. These notes can even be sent as part of the file, so that another user can edit them.

Scrivener – The notecard view in this writing software is great for organizing information. The color-coding feature here adds to the usability. You can move the notecards around as you build the outline section of your Story Bible. The program also lets you save your research files in the same place as your outline and manuscript. There’s a cost for the software but, if you want to keep everything in one place, consider the investment.

Wiki Software – You can find free software that will allow you to build a hypertext database for your story (similar to how Wikipedia works). Wikis allow for non-linear thinking, embedding of additional files, and internal linkage between pages. This helps to find related information quickly, and to keep your notes in one place. (Example: You can click straight from one character’s history into the basic bio info on another character that plays a part in that history.) Seeing your thoughts laid out with the same authority as real-world wikis can make your world feel more legitimate, building self-confidence for you as a writer, especially when you take your file from “edit mode” and export it as html files.

This Workbook – You can write directly on the pages in this book (assuming you bought the print version) and make extra notes in the margins. But you may find yourself needing to do a worksheet for more than one character or more than one setting, so you may want to dedicate a separate notebook or computer document for overflow notes. You can also make copies of the worksheets from this book for your personal use. If you are using the e-book version of Story Like a Journalist, the instructions section for each worksheet contain a link to a printable version of that worksheet, which is to be printed for personal use only.

Story Bible Overarching Worksheet (O-1)

Use this as an organizational tool to synthesize everything you learn by working through the other worksheets. Just give the overview of each section, so you have the most important information easily at hand when (if you are a planner) you start drafting your story, or (if you are a discovery writer) when you start editing your draft.

Compiling a Story Bible

At its heart, a Story Bible is just a collection of lists -- both to-dos and have-dones. The document may be in flux – but you should be building a comprehensive plan, so that when you are ready to write your novel, you have all the information you could possibly need close at hand.

Continue building it as you write and uncover new things. (I like to keep a separate “to fix” list as I write or edit.)

Character Notes

I also keep a separate list, organized by character, for bits of dialogue that feel like things the character might say that haven’t yet found a spot in the story, along with fragments of scenes starring her.

Having a list of character names helps keep the names from being too similar. For instance, if you have a lot of two syllable names that all either start with c, k or s OR end with y-sounds, it gets confusing to the reader fast.

I’d like you to meet Cindy, Sandy, Macie, Cadie, Chloe, Cassie and Kaitlyn. Can you keep them all straight in your head?

This also helps when you want to make sure you aren’t using the same name in a different story or don’t quite remember how you spelled Queekkkgleth.

Settings and Objects Notes

The same goes when you are trying to remem...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter One: Your Story Bible -- The Entry Point to Your Story World
• Chapter Two: Examine the Question -- WHO?
• Chapter Three: Examine the Question -- WHAT?
• Chapter Four: Examine the Questions -- WHEN? and WHERE?
• Chapter Five: Examine the Questions – HOW? and WHY?