Story Like a Journalist - Who Relates to Character

By Amber Royer

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. When you look at the classic questions journalists ask, the first one is generally WHO? In noveling terms WHO relates to character.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Amber Royer
• Release date: Jun 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781952854019

Amber Royer

Amber Royer is the author of the high-energy comedic space opera Chocoverse series (Free Chocolate, Pure Chocolate available now. Fake Chocolate coming April 2020). She teaches creative writing classes for teens and adults through both the University of Texas at Arlington Continuing Education Department and Writing Workshops Dallas. She is the discussion leader for the Saturday Night Write writing craft group. She spent five years as a youth librarian, where she organized teen writers' groups and teen writing contests. In addition to two cookbooks co-authored with her husband, Amber has published a number of articles on gardening, crafting and cooking for print and on-line publications. They are currently documenting a project growing Cacao trees indoors.

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Introduction

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 do these writers have in common? An excellent sense of character, and clean prose that clearly puts forward 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 manuscript.

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.

Chapter One: Your Story Bible -- The Entry Point To Your Story World

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 a reader 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.  This concept 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 too.

You can use a detailed novel plan to keep you on track and establish rules about your single novel, series, or shared writing world.  It includes detailed information on the world, characters and backstory relative to the plot.  Whereas journalists have a plethora of real world references sources to work from, we novelists invent our worlds whole cloth.  A Story Bible can give you a reference source to look at to see connections and spark ideas.

Planners:

You can work through the Story Bible first – or you can discovery write 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 that secondary character’s eyes were green or blue six chapters ago.

Discovery Writers:

It is possible to build a Story Bible after you’ve written your draft.  And while it may seem counterintuitive, it can be beneficial to do the exercises 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?

Ex. do your aliens eat insects in chapter 12 or are they vegetarians like you said in chapter 4?

-- Do you have too many characters?

Ex. Maybe the protagonist doesn’t need six guy friends, when three serve as sounding boards.

-- What backstory do you need to delve deeper into?

Ex. 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?

Ex. How did your protagonist know that the gun was in the sewer grate?  Better go back and foreshadow.

Structure Doesn’t Hamper Creativity

Remember: just because you wrote it in the novel plan document, it’s not canon – yet.  If you do 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.

For a novelist, the Story Bible is in complete flux until the first volume is published.  Once that happens, everything already presented becomes fixed for the reader, and readers will call you on changed things.

Organize Your Notes

Learning Styles

Structure your document based on your own learning style.  For instance, I like to color code and to display information graphically.  I sketch out things I can’t visualize spatially, such as rooms where I need to nail down locations of doors and windows so they stay the same from scene to scene.  I am primarily a tactile learner, but I rely heavily on the visual (my second most dominant learning style) when planning/writing, for obvious reasons.  I do find my scenes come out stronger if I have actually done hands-on research and gotten to heft the sword, grow the plant, or walked on the beach in question. 

If you don’t know what kind of learner you are, there are a number of free tests you can take on the Internet.

Auditory – Auditory learners absorb information best by listening to it.  They need to hear things, even if it is reading worksheet instructions or newly completed scenes out loud to themselves.  Consider using auditory elements in your Story Bible, including song playlists, examples of speech patterns, and dictated notes.

Visual – Visual learners absorb information best by seeing images, or by reading.  They often picture what they are learning in their heads.  Consider color coding your notes by character or by story thread or by journalism questioned answered.  Collect photos of people who look like your characters, and make mood boards

Tactile – Tactile learners absorb information best doing. They need to touch things, engage in processes, move, build or draw.  Consider recording yourself acting out your scenes, mimicking the facial expressions your characters would be making.  Maybe try out your characters hobbies and record the experience.  If you can, get someone to interview you, where you answer as your character and try out that character’s body language.

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.

Story Bible Overarching Worksheet (O-1) – ADD TO THIS

Use this as an organizational tool to synthesize everything you learn by working through the other worksheets.

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.

Note 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 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 traded so that another user can edit them.

Scrivner – 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,