Story Like a Journalist - How and Why Relate to Plot and Theme

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.  Journalists carefully consider HOW happened to figure out WHY it happened.  Fiction writers need to do the same thing.  For novelists HOW and WHY refer to plot and theme. 

In this textbook/workbook you will look at how to build a plot that reveals theme.  You will graph your plot several different ways to refine a story that resonates. There is also instructional material on scene level plotting, and how to weave scenes together to create a pattern that will lead to an artistic statement rather than a jumble of events.  There is also information and worksheets that will help you include symbols and iconic character traits to add to the meaning of your work. 

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Hemmingway worked as a newspaper journalist before he became a fiction writer. E.B. White did a stint at the New Yorker. L.M. Montgomery was a reporter in Halifax before tackling Anne of Green Gables. Margaret Mitchell got her start as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. What these writers have in common: an excellent sense of character, and the ability to write clean prose that clearly puts forwards the characters' goals and motivations. This ability may well come from having mastered the journalistic art, which emphasizes creating a sound story that balances logic, research and emotional authenticity.

Even if you're working in a purely creative world, you can still use those principles, and learn to organize and research like a journalist, and to ask the questions a journalist asks either before or after you write your story.