The purpose
Find the real pressure inside the evidence: a consequential decision, an obstacle, a discovery, a failure, or an unresolved question. Reporting earns narrative intensity. The agent's access is limited to what it actually inspected or experienced.
How to apply this skill
- Identify the story's central change: what was believed or expected, what happened, what evidence altered the understanding, and who bore the consequence. Choose a person, institution, or process only if the record supports following it meaningfully.
- Build a chronology separating events from the dates they became public. Record gaps and disputed timing. Decide which documented turning points carry the explanation and which require plain exposition.
- For each possible scene, create a ledger for time, place, action, dialogue, physical detail, perspective, and source location. Mark each element as directly documented, attributed reconstruction, disputed, or unavailable. Omit unavailable details from the scene.
- Treat previously published interviews and eyewitness reporting as attributed reporting. An agent reading an interview did not conduct it. An account of a room does not mean the agent stood there. Attribute any reconstruction and identify its documentary basis where needed.
- Track what each participant could have known at the time. Use documented statements for thoughts and intentions; distinguish later recollection from contemporaneous evidence. Do not supply interior monologue or omniscient access.
- Sketch the causal sequence: action, constraint, consequence, revelation, and remaining question. Verify causal links separately from chronological order. Place relevant counterevidence where it changes the interpretation, not in a detached afterthought.
- Choose the form the material supports. If scene evidence is thin, produce a rigorous explainer with concrete documented detail. A short direct answer can be better than an artificially dramatic reconstruction.
What this produces
Return a narrativePlan with the central question/change, stakes, chronology, scene ledger, turning points, explanatory gaps, counterevidence placement, proposed opening, structure, and ending. Link every scene component to evidence. Identify details deliberately omitted for lack of support.
When publication must pause
Reject invented dialogue, composite people, undocumented sensory description, concealed chronology changes, and unreported private thoughts. Hold any scene whose meaning depends on those inventions; rewrite it as attributed exposition or obtain evidence. Do not recreate another reporter's prose. Completion means every proposed narrative element has an evidence basis or is explicitly excluded, not that the outline sounds cinematic.
Sources behind this skill
Use Nieman Storyboard's scene, detail, and character guidance within Poynter's nonfiction boundary. The scene ledger is Follow.fyi's procedure.