How to Write a Story

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody I'm John Graden, I'm a professional speaker, a trainer, and the author of the Impostor Syndrome. How do you write a feature story? I've been the publisher and editor and I've written for many, many magazines. So let me share with you some of my experiences. If you are to the point where you've been assigned this story good for you. Let's do it well. Make sure you understand exactly what your editor wants. Make sure you guys are both of your ladders are on the same wall. So if he is expecting one thing and you do something else, you are going to have to redo it. And that is really a waste of time for both of you. And it makes you look like an amateur and you don't want that. Make sure you know your word count, how many words and your deadline. Beat that deadline. As you start to expand the story discuss the story with some of your friends and colleagues, get a sense of their reaction to it. Here's a good example. With the impostor syndrome, when I would explain to people that the impostor syndrome is a feeling that you are not as smart, skilled or talented as people think you are, they go oh my God, really that's me. There's a name for that? It was virtually the same response over and over again. So I was able to weave that into my query letters, my book proposals and then stories that I've written to promote the impostor syndrome. So when you get this emotional reaction from people make note of that. It may become your headline, it may become your lead sentence, the sentence that's used to hook your readers into the story. It may be part of your intro, and it certainly can become even the title of your book. So I want to gage where the emotions at with this subject. When I have lots of facts and figures like you know, unemployment rates or whatever, inflation, I want to bring that down from a big macro view into a micro view of how it effects the person on the street. If people are losing their jobs, how is that effecting this family of four who is facing Christmas. So I want to try and humanize the article to make sure that I'm connecting with the reader. The headline and the first sentence in the intro all work as your sales person for this article. They sell the potential reader on investing the time to actually read the story so it's got the promise of benefit, where it's got to teach them something of interest or it's got to just entertain them if nothing else. So make sure you spend a lot of time on the headline or the title of the story, the intro to the story and then that lead sentence or two which is also called the hook, we are going to hook them into read the story. So I want to promise a benefit or I want to teach them some type of new strategy or something that's going to help them improve their lives. So when you write the headline to the story, here's a good test that I've learned to use, I use the so what test. So what, I read the headline so what. And unemployment is on the rise, so what. How does that effect me? Families facing dire Christmas, it's hard to say so what to that. Do to inflation, due to unemployment. So I'm taking that big picture and bringing it down to the reader's heart. I'm John Graden and I hope that helps you to write a good feature story, thanks."