The idea of ​​generating a space of a whole day, during the Faber residence dedicated to Literary Journalism, where to carry out a story development workshop came from the teaching staff of the Master’s Degree in Literary Journalism, Communication and Humanities at the UAB. We liked the idea of ​​creating a meeting space where authors already published, ex-students of the master’s degree, teachers and everyone who would like to come (other residents, general citizens of Olot, perhaps local journalists …) shared their ways to work, their referents and their strategies when they have to face specific challenges writting a non-fiction story.

The idea worked extraordinarily well. In Can Trincheria, on Thursday, September 20th, in a double session in the morning and afternoon (plus a group lunch in which discussion went on), we brought together about twenty people interested in non-fiction stories. The orientation, the theme, the tone, the structure and the plot, the narrative voices, the characters … Among these, there were students and alumni of the master’s degree arrived from different parts of the world, with a predominance of Latin Americans, but local reporters and some other interested people from Olot also attended.

In the morning, Andrés Nef, Marina Pallás, Amalia Torres, Lucía Maina and Ezequiel González explained how they investigated, conceptualized, planned and wrote their nonfiction stories with which they won the Mecoph-Base narrative journalism prize, in its two calls. In the afternoon, the two hours spent weren’t enough and the workshop was moved to the Hotel Riu Fluvià, where we continued discussing. The best of the experience was the contact that was established between people who share the same field of work and who were not known.