Young reporters and the journey of finding “storytelling recipes”.

This is the first training course in five activities under the initiative’s framework, "No Voice - No Equal Future," which got funding from the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam, with the goal of strengthening the voice and participation of young ethnic minorities and young journalists in promoting equality, especially gender equality.

Mr. Dinh Duc Hoang - Deputy General Director of the UNESCO Information Center, former Editor of VnExpress and Labour newspaper, and an experienced expert in journalistic and multimedia marketing product creation - was the speaker in the course. Mr. Hoang is also an alumnus of the US Embassy’s Edward R. Murrow fellowship program.

Within 1 day, the trainees explored and discussed the following themes: the definition of the story; the principle of creating a story; 6 types of struggle in the story; the POV recipes (OREO); and 3 factors that help increase the persuasiveness and attractiveness of the work.

Specifically, the theme "Adjectives are Crime" is the most concerning topic, since the overuse of adjectives has become more common due to time-saving and the simplicity of making them "pop out" in the writing process. To solve this, the method of replacing common adjectives with nouns or verbs to describe any event or character will make the story more informative and attract the reader's attention. The trainerhad emphasized that "if each property were replaced by three actions, we would have infinity of matter."

Take some real-life examples: the story of a hired worker under Chuong Duong bridge, the story of a karaoke bar waitress, the story of a wife whose husband is a border guard, etc. The trainer said that everyone’s life is the big story, and writers need to know how to fully exploit the information in their stories. In particular, the need for “struggle” in the story will create a highlight and be the key to conveying the author's message.

“The course provided knowledge which I have not known before. And also gave me the inspiration and how to create an attractive story from the most ordinary materials”.

“The course helped me to think about the rules of story arrangement, how to ask questions without missing information, the rules of vivid description for readers”

“I really fond of comprehensible and vivid examples of the lectures. After the training course, I think I should make use of corpus of various fields, especially Vietnamese literature”.

Those are three pieces of feedbacks after the training course. This shows the necessity and effectiveness of this nonprofit activity. 

According to plan, VSF will continue to organize field trips for trainees in the course in order to seek and communicate good practices and lessons learned in promoting equality via  exploiting the stories of  young ethnic minorities in Van Ho district, Son La province.

                                                                                                  Source: Tien Phong Newspaper