Story Like a Journalist - What Relates to Premise

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.  Just like a journalist, as a fiction writer, you will need to define WHAT your story is about.  For the novelist WHAT relates to premise.

In this textbook/workbook you will look at what you plan to write about from different angles and will use the information you uncover to create a story premise that has an active protagonist in an intriguing story, fighting for high stakes. (These can include both external-world stakes and emotional stakes).

This workbook also deals with how to generate ideas.  There is instructional material that focuses on understanding how to build conflict into your story, understand clear goals and motivations for character action, and making sure that your stakes are high enough.  All of this works in tandem with the worksheets.

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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.