“We teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.” ~ Gloria Steinem ~
In the spirit of pay-it-forward (and aware of how much I have to pay back), I offer teaching tip-sheets, links to work I learn and teach from, and favorite titles from my groaning bookshelves. The topics are broadband — from writing to interviewing to editing, from grammar to metaphor, from breaking news to narrative. The core is reality – or, as we say in journalism: “You can’t make this shit up.” And the philosophy is that journalism is equal parts mechanic and muse.
Use and share. Send me your own collected wisdom so I can learn, borrow and post. Just credit the source. Because that’s what journalists do.
- Ten-Tips-for-Story-Editors
- Reader Wheel
- Story Idea Generation – 10tips
- Six-Step Writing Process
- 5StepStoryCoach
- Literary Forensics
- New Age Inverted Pyramid
- Seven Paths to Stories
STORY STRUCTURE vexes the most accomplished of writers. Wrestling with length, focus, order of information and pacing is even more challenging in the digital age, when effective stories can be as tight and episodic as a Twitter stream or as spooled out and comprehensive as a book, as direct as a quick-hit news narrative or as luxurious as a Longreads pick. Complicate things further by folding in the myriad layers of multi-media.
Different writers (and we are as different as our challenges are the same) have different metaphors to describe how they approach structure. My primary one comes from a world where things were constructed. My father built the house I grew up in and beautiful furniture to fill it; my mother sewed clothes to wear and knit afghans to wrap in. Both worked from patterns, but added their own special touches. At some point, I realized that stories are constructed pieces — built word by word, graf by graf, scene by scene, section by section.
I also sometimes see a story structure playing out on a map or a calendar or a clock. Anything that helps me visualize a whole story as the gathering of distinct but essentially related parts. Where I once rejected such disciplined structures as formulaic and dull, I now see them as solid foundations that support infinite possibility and creativity.
- StoryBlueprints (My basic go-to blueprints that help “construct” a creative story effectively and efficiently.)
- Story Structure. (Courtesy of IRE Radio. Edited audio version of a workshop from the June 2014 IRE conference in San Francisco. Focuses on the broken/woven narrative, the Wall Street Journal model and a combination of the two.)