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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. Looking at the questions journalists ask can help you think of the characters and events in your story as real people, whose lives you are recording, just like you were writing memoir or a news article. Approach planning your novel the way a journalist plans out writing a news piece. They figure out what they will need to research for the piece, and decide how they will structure that research into a narrative. They decide on a format for the story’s lede (opening designed to draw the reader in) and structure the story to follow up on the questions presented in that lede. They document everything, so that they can verify the accuracy of everything they present. You can do the same for your fiction. This workbook serves as a full self-paced writing course, presenting theory on each aspect of the world/characters you are trying to create – and then offering step-by-step worksheets that allow you to apply what you just learned.

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 gives you access to all five volumes, for a total of over 100 worksheets.