From Topic to Story: How to Find Characters and Narrative Arcs to Draw in Your Listener

We’ve all heard an editor say, “This is really more of a topic than a story.” But the process of getting from one to the other can feel opaque and mysterious. How do you get from an interesting topic to a gripping, emotional, and nuanced narrative? In this class, we’ll figure it out. Students will come to the first class with a topic they’re interested in, which can be as general as they like. Over the course of four weeks, they will turn that topic into a story. 

First, we’ll talk about what makes a good story, so that we know what we’re looking for. We’ll talk about how story-finding is partly about finding a story, but it’s also about crafting a story. We’ll talk about how to engineer the elements of a good story when they don’t appear to be there. And we’ll talk about learning to follow our intuition to find the “seeds” of the story throughout the reporting process. In the later sessions, we’ll go deep on how to interview for story and how to adjust your reporting plan as new information emerges.