Amber Royer - Story Like a Journalist

Story Like a Journalist:

A Workbook for Novelists

Build Your Story Bible

Using the 5-Ws and H

Amber Royer

Golden Tip Press

A Golden Tip Press Instructional Series original 2020

Copyright 2020 by Amber Royer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any for or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Cover art and editorial design: Amber Royer

Printing: IngramSpark

Published by Golden Tip Press
1520 Ridhardson Dr
#1311
Richardson, TX 75080

ISBN 978-0-9914083-7-5

Other books by the author:

The Chocoverse Trilogy:

Free Chocolate

Pure Chocolate

Fake Chocolate

Cookbook:

There are Herbs in My Chocolate

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.

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

The pieces journalists write are usually called stories, because thats what they center around. Raw facts dont appeal to people the way stories do, wont 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 doesnt provide the tension that gets readers to turn pages.

Journalists know they have to captivate readers quickly, so they dont 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 todays 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 journalists 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 youve answered the questions in this workbook, you should be able to write the story with confidence. Take off your journalists hat, and immerse yourself in your story world. Live inside your characters hearts and minds. Most of all, have fun with it.

If youre a discovery writer, look at the draft youve 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.

One of the most basic lessons in journalism centers around the classic 5 Ws 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-Ws into your opening chapter. Then as the story progresses, give the reader more details on WHO your protagonist is, WHAT shes 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.

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 storys 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 novels 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 novels 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.