Story Like a Journalist

Introduction

Story Like a Journalist combines journalistic planning strategies and novel writing theory into a systematic workbook that takes you from determining the best protagonist for your story to imbuing your work with meaning. Completing the exercises will allow you to build a Story Bible for your novel. These techniques can work for both planners AND discovery writers. You can work through the entire workbook before beginning a project – or you can use the individual worksheets as needed when you get stuck or need to brainstorm.

Think Like a Journalist -- Write Like a Novelist

How can a novelist benefit from thinking like a journalist? It comes down to mindset.

The pieces journalists write are usually called stories, because that’s what they center around. Raw facts don’t appeal to people the way stories do, won’t connect them to a subject on an emotional level. To make for compelling reading, journalists have to use an organizational structure that turns the news into a narrative. What the novelist does is related. Raw worldbuilding, or heavy-handed theme doesn’t provide the tension that gets readers to turn pages.

Journalists know they have to captivate readers quickly, so they don’t waste time starting with background or preliminaries. They get right into the interesting action. Fiction is the same. Something has to be happening to a character we care about, right away, or today’s readers will put your novel down. Again: narrative is key. And that narrative needs to feel absolutely real.

Journalists analyze the pieces that make up the story before they start writing. They conduct interviews to get the perspective of different people who were involved. And they maintain these perspectives, providing consistency throughout the article. Reporters go to the location where things happened and observe it for themselves. They keep digging until they figure out why people acted in certain ways, why bad things happened, where the meaning can be found.

Novelists can borrow the journalist’s toolbox. You can interview your characters, by writing out questions and having the characters answer in their first-person voice. You can make maps of imaginary places. Or visit real ones you plan to use as settings. You can write – and re-write – a synopsis until you understand the main arc of your story and the personal arc your characters need to take.

Think of how much more vivid your writing can become when you start to feel like your story and your characters are as real as events and people ripped from the headlines.

Once you’ve answered the questions in this workbook, you should be able to write the story with confidence. Take off your journalist’s hat, and immerse yourself in your story world. Live inside your characters’ hearts and minds. Most of all, have fun with it.

If you’re a discovery writer, look at the draft you’ve written and pick apart the elements you discovered. Use this information to fill in the worksheets. That will tell you if you have a sound story, and if there are areas you can improve. You will also be able to determine what elements do and do not belong in your manuscript.

Framing the 5 W’s for Fiction

One of the most basic lessons in journalism centers around the classic 5 W’s and H. In order to write a story people will want to read – even if that story is a complete fiction -- you need to answer all of them.

Who? What? When? Where? How? Why?

Give an answer for each and the reader will have a good bead on what actually happened and the context in which it happened. These are the same questions you need to answer when writing fiction. You just need to frame them slightly differently.

Instead of asking who was there when a particular set of events happened (as the journalist does) the novelist asks which characters NEED to be in a particular scene for the scene to work and to allow those characters to get the information they will need for the rest of the manuscript.

In addition to interviewing (in this case fictional) people to find out why they took certain actions (as a journalist would), the novelist looks at potential patterns of events and asks what pattern these events need to form for the reader to understand a universal truth – which gives your book theme and answers the question of WHY the book matters.

Work an initial version of these 5-W’s into your opening chapter. Then as the story progresses, give the reader more details on WHO your protagonist is, WHAT she’s really gotten herself into, and WHY the chaos around her is making her arc.

This book is organized into sections revolving around each of those questions so, that as you complete the worksheets in each section, you will gain a clear understanding of how that aspect of your novel world works. There is also a section showing how thinking like a journalist can help you create more convincing fiction.

If you just want to work on one aspect of your novel, feel free to skip around and do the worksheets in your preferred order.

This workbook is intended to help you build a comprehensive Story Bible. The concept of a Story Bible comes from television writing, where a number of writers need a planning document to weave together a continuity-error free show. The document is used to resolve any disputes on how specific elements of the world interact, but these documents work for novelists working alone, too.

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 remember a place you invented or what you called the technology that makes your character’s starship run. This comes in surprisingly handy if you need to find all the times a character used a technology or all the times they visited a particular place. If your character invents things, is part of a spy organization, or lives in a futuristic/fantastic society, chances are you’ve created a lot of these.

Named Characters List (A-2)

Keep a running list of each character name you choose. Update this list any time you add a character, change a character’s name, or someone gives the character a new nickname.

Name Meaning -- Look up any real-world associations with the name to make sure it is appropriate to the character. If the name is invented, give it a meaning.

Nicknames -- Include nicknames (basically anything else – good or bad – that another character calls this character).

Role in Story – Define the character’s reason for being in the story. (Examples: protagonist, antagonist, love interest)

More information on names can be found in Chapter 2.

Invented Objects and Places List (A-3)

Keep a running list of each object and place name you invent. Update it any time you change and object or place name or come up with new information about the object/place.

Objects

Object – Define what the object is. Look up proposed names to make sure they don’t have any unexpected real-world meanings or unintended associations.

Use -- Note how you use the object in the story.

Role in Story – Note why this object is important in the story. Who uses it and why?

Places

Place -- Places can include everything from planets or countries to named businesses and schools – even your character’s home, if it is a named ranch or estate. Look up proposed names to understand any similarities to real place names/other words.

History Factoid – Note what this place is known for. What major event happened here? What makes this place unique? Give us something to remember.

Role in Story – Note why this place is important. Who visits it and why?

Determining Narration

Narration is all about who is telling your