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.
Take a deep dive into understanding who your characters are and what drives them to act with a series of worksheets that will help you define everything from psychological traits and archetypes to character skills and backstory.
In this textbook/workbook you will learn how to build a distinct cast of characters with qualities that can be specifically attacked by your plot. There is instructional material that focuses on understanding the psychological aspects of character building, as well as the importance of physicality. 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.
