- 1). Talk to your subject, if he is still alive. Telling a true story means interviewing the prime players in the life drama if you can. For a book, one interview won't do with the primary players. You should have multiple conversations with the main people in the story.
- 2). Talk to people peripheral to the story. Again, do multiple interviews. Each of these people may have only a small moment or two of the story, but together they can give the story the depth and detail that can make a great true story book.
- 3). Search local newspaper "morgues" for news reports of the story, if the story made the papers. Local librarians can help a lot with this.
- 4). Create an outline of the story from your information from your interviews, research and photos. It's best to start with a chronological outline, placing each part of the story in a time sequence. You may not end up writing the book this way, but it will help to keep you focused on the events as they happened. If your true story is about a person's life, for example, you can break this into sections such as parents' lives, early life, school life, young adulthood, prime of life, achievements, death (if applicable) and legacy.
- 5). Write another outline, this one in the order you want to tell the story. For example, if you're going to tell the story of Neil Armstrong, you may want to start the book with the actual moon landing and his words there, then go back to his birth and start from there.
- 6). Get someone you trust to check the facts of your story. This is essential. While a publisher may have a fact checker, this may not always be the case. For example, a book written about a story during the Holocaust was published as a true story only to find out after publication that parts of it had been fabricated. This caused embarrassment for the author and the publisher, and the publisher withdrew the book, demanding the money back from the author. It is important to make certain everything you have written is factual.
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