Story Like a Journalist - When and Where Relate to Setting

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. You want to evoke a feeling of WHEN and WHERE that will make readers feel like they have just taken a walk through your story world. Take a few cues from how journalists do this. For novelists WHEN and WHERE relate to setting.

In this textbook/workbook you will look at the nuts and bolts of worldbuilding. This applies whether you are writing contemporary fiction, or something set across the galaxy. You still need to construct a believable story world. The worksheets will assist you in everything from deciding what era to set your story in to creating a workable fictional society. There are additional worksheets for worldbuilding speculative fiction.

There is instructional material that focuses on incorporating your setting into the story, and on creating and using maps to keep everything consistent. 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.