When Journalists Try Writing Novels

Journalists are not encouraged to linger.

You learn that lesson fairly early in the business. Get the important stuff up high. Tell readers what happened, who did it, where and when it happened, and, if you can figure it out before deadline, why. Be accurate. Be clear. Keep it moving. If a sentence doesn’t contribute something useful, get rid of it.

Above all, don’t make anything up.

I spent years writing that way, and the habits became so ingrained that I hardly thought about them. Then I decided to write a novel.

My first draft of Flat Spin, the book that eventually became the first in my Cordell Logan mystery series, came in at roughly 40,000 words. I remember reaching the end and feeling pretty good about myself. I had actually done it. I had written a novel.

There was just one problem.

It was about half a novel.

Commercial novels vary enormously in length, obviously, but 80,000 words is a reasonable ballpark. I had managed to introduce my characters, launch the plot, complicate matters, solve the mystery and get everybody offstage in approximately half the customary distance.

This was efficient as hell.

It was also a problem.

I see versions of this now among students in Fact to Fiction, one of the graduate creative writing courses I teach at Harvard Extension School. Some come from journalism, others from professional nonfiction backgrounds, and many are very good writers. They understand clarity. They understand structure. They know how to get information across without making readers hack their way through a thicket of unnecessary prose.

Then they start writing fiction.

Sometimes their scenes feel rushed. Characters enter, say what they came to say and leave. Rooms barely exist. Emotional reactions are acknowledged and quickly dispensed with. Description tends to be limited to whatever is necessary for the reader to understand the action.

I recognize the impulse because I had it myself. For years, I had been trained to remove anything that wasn’t doing obvious work. The problem was that I had too narrow an idea of what constituted work.

Fiction needs room for things journalism can often afford to leave out.

Imagine a reporter covering a house fire. The story will probably tell us when the fire started, how many engines responded, whether anybody was injured and what investigators think caused it. Depending on the circumstances, there might be a quote from the homeowner standing across the street watching firefighters finish the job.

The novelist has other options.

Maybe the homeowner is standing barefoot on the sidewalk holding a coffee mug. She doesn’t remember carrying it out of the house. It’s an ugly thing, chipped along the rim, something her granddaughter gave her years ago. Her house is burning down and somehow this is what she saved.

If I were writing a news story on deadline, the mug might never make it into the piece.

If I were writing a novel, I might build the scene around it.

That was one of the things I had to learn. A detail doesn’t have to advance the plot to advance the story.

Once you discover your fiction is too lean, however, it’s remarkably easy to create the opposite problem.

You start adding things.

The room acquires curtains. The curtains acquire a color and a fabric and a pattern. The sofa gets described, followed by the coffee table and the paintings on the wall. A character walks in and we learn the color of his eyes, the cut of his jacket, the shape of his face and what kind of shoes he’s wearing.

Before long, you’ve gone from famine to Thanksgiving.

That wasn’t what my 40,000-word manuscript needed either. I didn’t need another 40,000 words of furniture.

What I eventually began to understand—and what I try to get across to my students now—is that the question isn’t really how much description to use. It’s which details to choose.

Suppose I tell you a man is nervous. I can describe the worry in his eyes and the perspiration on his forehead, or I can have him sit at a table folding a paper cocktail napkin into smaller and smaller squares until there’s almost nothing left to fold.

I’ll take the napkin.

It gives the reader something concrete to see and allows the reader to participate. I haven’t announced that the man is nervous. I’ve provided evidence and let the reader reach the conclusion.

Come to think of it, that’s a fairly journalistic thing to do.

Which is why I don’t think journalists need to unlearn journalism to become good fiction writers. Quite the opposite. They need to figure out which parts of their training to keep.

Observation is one of them.

Good reporters notice things. They notice the shoes somebody wore to court, the untouched plate at a political fundraiser, the family photograph turned facedown on a desk. They listen for the odd phrase somebody uses repeatedly. They learn that what people don’t say can sometimes be more revealing than what they do.

Those instincts are enormously useful in fiction.

Annie Proulx worked as a journalist before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer, and her fiction has a reporter’s specificity to it. She notices objects, clothing, vehicles, buildings, weather and landscape, but rarely in the manner of somebody dutifully filling in a description box. The details feel discovered rather than supplied.

That’s what I’m after when I write fiction, and what I encourage students to look for: not more details, but the revealing detail.

Gabriel García Márquez, who also came out of journalism, famously made the point that while a single false fact can damage a piece of journalism, a single true detail can help persuade readers to believe an entire work of fiction.

I love that idea because it gets at something journalists already understand. Specificity creates credibility.

The trick is giving specificity another job.

Say I’m writing a scene in which two men meet at a McDonald’s.

I don’t need to describe McDonald’s. You know McDonald’s. Describing the menu board, the plastic tables and the drink station is unlikely to improve either of our lives.

But suppose one man gets there first.

There are plenty of empty tables, but he passes them and takes one in the corner where nobody can get behind him. He chooses the chair facing the entrance. He keeps his jacket on. He buys coffee but doesn’t drink it. Whenever the door opens, his eyes go there first.

Eventually the man he’s waiting for walks in. Our guy doesn’t raise a hand or call his name. He waits to be noticed.

Now the scene interests me.

I haven’t said he’s a police officer or a criminal or a former soldier or a guy whose bookie has threatened to break his legs. I haven’t said he’s afraid of anybody. Maybe he isn’t. Maybe sitting where he can see the door is simply what he does, the way some people automatically check their mirrors when a car has been behind them for too long.

Whatever the reason, we’ve learned something about him.

We could spend half a page describing that McDonald’s and learn virtually nothing. Or we can watch a man choose a chair and begin to understand who he is.

Looking back, I think this was the real problem with that first draft of Flat Spin. I had written the events of the novel without always fully writing the experience of them.

Things happened. Characters reacted. The story moved forward.

Sometimes it moved forward when it should have stayed put for another minute.

That’s difficult for a journalist. Staying put feels suspiciously like wasting space. But fiction occasionally needs to stop moving long enough for the reader to settle into a moment. A character walks into his childhood home for the first time in twenty years. He doesn’t necessarily need to head straight upstairs and discover the body. Maybe he notices the dent in the hallway wall where his father once threw a chair. Maybe he smells something from the kitchen that briefly makes him eight years old again.

Then he can discover the body.

Learning to do that helped me put meat on the bones of Flat Spin. I didn’t simply make scenes longer. I tried to make them fuller. I let characters think a little more, notice a little more, occasionally remember something. I paid more attention to atmosphere and sensory experience. I began to understand that a pause in the action isn’t necessarily a pause in the story.

And eventually my 40,000-word novel became an actual novel.

There’s a certain irony in all of this. The training that initially made fiction difficult for me ultimately became one of the things I value most when writing it. Journalism taught me to pay attention, distrust vagueness, look for telling details and resist using ten words where five will do.

I still believe in all of that.

I’ve just learned that sometimes the five extra words are where the novel is hiding

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