Tips, tricks and suggestions

Writers, share your tips, tricks and advice for churning out a great story - what has helped you in the past, and what do you feel newbies can benefit the most from?

Something that helps me a lot while writing news stories is remembering that a news story is about ONE thing. If the story cannot be summarized in a sentence - it is probably multiple stories collapsing into one and that confuses readers. It helps me a lot if I note down the answers to the following questions before I begin writing the first draft -

1. What is the story?
2. Why is this interesting - i.e. why should anyone care?
3. What scientific background is absolutely necessary to understand this story?
4. The 5 Ws - Who, what, when, where, why (and how)?
5. What would be a good way to begin telling this story (the lede)?

This helps with the next step - outlining, which gets rid of the blank page and makes writing the first draft much less scary, at least for me.

I came across an amazing piece on TON on the evaluation of an idea before pitching, really helpful.

Veteran science correspondent and journalist Robert Krulwich delivering a commencement speech at Berkeley about journalism and his experience in science journalism. Extremely inspiring!

That’s so helpful @Shreya specially the idea of summing it all up in a sentence. @pratikmpawar thank you for introducing me to the opennotebook website! Wonderful hub of resources.

Hey @vaidyaruj, I’m glad you found it helpful!