Chapter 10 - Shaping the Story

You will learn why it is important to outline a story, particularly a big story, at every stage of your investigation. And you will find out how to connect seemingly disconnected elements in your story and how to differentiate between essential and tangential points. The benefits of using a spreadsheet program to outline your notes will be demonstrated. You also will be shown how to visualize your story by diagramming the information you gathered. Finally, a sample story will take you step-by-step through the outlining process.

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Exercises

Practice outlining from man on the street interviews and from classroom brainstorming

  1. Do five man-on-street interviews with students on your campus about crime on or around the campus. After the first interview, create an outline of the information you gathered from it. From it, develop a premise as if this interview were an investigation into campus crime. Re-outline after each subsequent interview and see if your premise changes. Finally, find the Clery Act crime data for your campus and pull out of it relevant information about crimes. Re-outline your story with that data.
  2. As a class, each student should write on a piece of paper the top three problems facing this country and try to be as specific as possible. On a whiteboard list all the answers. Now try to consolidate those problems to five broader issues. Now rank those issues according to the number of students who named that issue as a problem. From that list come up with a story premise. If you had to turn this into a story, what would be your lead?

Big Story Steps

Outlining and preparing to write

  1. 10.1 Go through every interview and jot down the major points on a blackboard or on a wiki spreadsheet. Do the same for the data you collected and the documents and reports you gathered. Try to consolidate the points into five major groupings. How do they relate to your premise? Now is the time to change your premise if you need to.
  2. 10.2 Look for contradictions or shades of gray to explore in a sidebar. Try to order the groupings by level of importance.
  3. 10.3 See if you can find one interviewee who connects all the points and who can serve as a narrative thread.
  4. 10.4 Write up a tentative lead and a nut graph that summarizes all the major points in the story.
  5. 10.5 Brainstorm ways to end the story.
  6. 10.6 What are the holes in your story that you still need to fill? Who can answer the questions the holes raise, or where might you find the data that will fill the holes?
  7. 10.7 Write up a new To Do list to fill in the holes.