Story Like a Journalist

Want to write novels that feel real enough to the reader to have been ripped from the headlines, whatever your genre?  Here’s a Master Collection Textbook / Workbook that can help.

The Story Like a Journalist series 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.  There is instructional material that will give you a basic foundation in creative writing craft so that you understand how to build an effective story with the information you add into the worksheets.

The Master Collection with give you access to all six volumes, plus references to related material in the other books.

Story Like a Journalist Vol 1 – Think Like a Journalist to Build Your Novel’s Story Bible

Story Like a Journalist Vol 2 – WHO Relates to Your Novel’s Characters

Story Like a Journalist Vol 3 – WHAT Relates to Your Novel’s Story Premise

Story Like a Journalist Vol 4 – WHEN and WHERE Relate to Your Novel’s Setting and Worldbuilding

Story Like a Journalist Vol 5 – HOW Relates to Your Novel’s Plot

Story Like a Journalist Vol 6 – WHY Relates to Your Novel’s Themes

This Master Collection Workbook gives you over 100 worksheets.

Hemmingway worked 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.