From journalist to novelist

CEtchison · Mar 12, 2010

Is there anyone else here that has/had difficulty with the transition? And if so, what is/was the hardest change for you?

Mine is telling vs. showing, but I'm improving.

Another is editing. I can't make myself leave it until the end.

Woolly · Mar 12, 2010

Novelists say that every word counts, but they don't mean it the same way journalists do. Likewise with beginnings: novelists say start with important action, but if you interpret like a journalist you have a short story.

gothicangel · Mar 12, 2010

There are a lot of novelists that started out in journalism, so you are in good company!

*GA, being nice because her closest friend has just broken into journalism

[and he first started out in finance, moved into the police and now writing for one of the top broadsheets.]

PGK · Mar 12, 2010

My wife is a newspaper editor and she gets first look and editing of my MSs. She's so dead-set on AP style that if I were to use all of her editing comments I'd end up with a newspaper column instead of a novel.

MarkEsq · Mar 12, 2010

I went from journalist, to lawyer, to fiction-writer, which left me with two main issues.

1. I, too, cannot leave editing to the end. "Knock out a first draft, let yourself write crap, just get it on the page" is the advice. No can do.

2. I became very literal, and wouldn't let myself go when it came to the narrative. I couldn't say, "He was a giant, with hams for fists" because the lawyer/journalist in me laughed and said, "Oh? Where's the frickin' beanstalk, he's not a giant." The best cure for me for this has been reading other people's work, seeing how they eschew literal descriptions and conjure images with non-literal ones. Alan Furst is good at this, tight writing but not overly literal.

Axler · Mar 12, 2010

I went from three years as a journalist to 14 years as a novelist and now I'm back in journalism.

Quite the difficult adjustment.

CEtchison · Mar 12, 2010

PGK said:
She's so dead-set on AP style that if I were to use all of her editing comments I'd end up with a newspaper column instead of a novel.

I've edited several chapters for a friend of mine and I was careful to not over-edit. I'm still known as "the slasher".

The Lonely One · Mar 12, 2010

PGK said:
My wife is a newspaper editor and she gets first look and editing of my MSs. She's so dead-set on AP style that if I were to use all of her editing comments I'd end up with a newspaper column instead of a novel.

That's one major difference; AP style drove me up a wall when I worked for a paper, and it's not applicable to novels, at least not as the standard. If I'm correct Chicago is the usual style of fiction.

I always found journalism to be little about the writing, more about a strong lead and strong quotes, and you spend the whole day waiting for phone calls, hounding sources, sitting at crime scenes or in a courtroom, and about 30 minutes regurgitating the story.

The writing doesn't have to be anything great, just stylistically correct, with correct information, and full of good quotes (preferably those the competition doesn't have).

Fiction, in my eyes, isn't even in the same league as journalism. The fact that they're linked by the written word is irrelevant to me. Fiction often defies formula, develops important information through suspense and foreshadowing (rather than always shoving it up front), breaks rules and can even be told from an unreliable narrator. I see fiction more as molding clay, while journalism is gathering puzzle pieces from various places and making them fit together.

CEtchison · Mar 12, 2010

MarkEsq said:
1. I, too, cannot leave editing to the end. "Knock out a first draft, let yourself write crap, just get it on the page" is the advice. No can do.

So glad I'm not the only one. I've re-written my first chapter I don't know how many times. I may need to hire someone to walk into my house, demand my pages immediately and take them away from me.

My old editor is just a couple of miles down the road. Maybe he'd do it.

CEtchison · Mar 12, 2010

The Lonely One said:
I always found journalism to be little about the writing, more about a strong lead and strong quotes, and you spend the whole day waiting for phone calls, hounding sources, sitting at crime scenes or in a courtroom, and about 30 minutes regurgitating the story.

It definitely depends upon what beat you're working. Straightforward news.... absolutely. But human interest stories and other profiles are very different IMO.

colealpaugh · Mar 12, 2010

SummerSpring said:
Is there anyone else here that has/had difficulty with the transition? And if so, what is/was the hardest change for you?

Mine is telling vs. showing, but I'm improving.

Another is editing. I can't make myself leave it until the end.

POV was an obvious issue, but even simple things like dialogue tags have been problematic. It just doesn't seem right to leave so much unattributed, at least as far as a newspaper copy editor would be concerned.

Now, when I go to bang out a quick press release for my wife's library, I struggle over something which used to take sixty seconds. If you were caught looking like you weren't busy in the newsroom, an editor would hand you a six inch stack of releases to polish.

The upside is writing habits. Even back at my first job in 1983, we were told the industry was failing and just be happy we all had jobs. Kinda made you write for your life.

gothicangel · Mar 12, 2010

I envy journo's turned novelists, they are already trained to write powerful and skinned to the bone prose.

I love that.

Shadow_Ferret · Mar 12, 2010

I don't get the "can't keep the editing until the end" thing. It's certainly not something I was taught in journalism. And I never edit anything until I finished it and that includes feature articles, news stories, short stories, and novels.

One of my journalism instructors always called newspaper reporting as "literature in a hurry."

And I still refer to my AP Style Guide. I used to own a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, too, but never opened it.

PGK · Mar 12, 2010

Shadow_Ferret said:
And I never edit anything until I finished it and that includes feature articles, news stories, short stories, and novels.

I can't leave a single sentence unedited (or looked at for editing) before sitting down to write again. Leaving something in the "rough" to me is like sitting down at the table to eat while I'm looking at (and smelling) yesterday's rotting leftovers.

I don't have a journalism background, but I'd go nuts if someone made me leave all the editing until after the first draft of the MS was finished.

Namatu · Mar 12, 2010

I edit as I go, and my completed first draft is very close to my finished product. But you have to figure out when to finish the editing for now and what to save for later. If it's a plot point that's not working, fix it. If it's "this sentence isn't quite right, but I can't figure out exactly how to say it," leave it.

shaldna · Mar 12, 2010

gothicangel said:
There are a lot of novelists that started out in journalism, so you are in good company!

Wasn't Terry Pratchett a journalist?

Noah Body · Mar 24, 2010

So was Michael Connelly of the Harry Bosch series, actually.

Cathy C · Mar 24, 2010

I moved from freelance magazine articles to novels. I found it was great practice to stay within contracted book lengths. But I did struggle with stilted dialogue at first. It took some work to remove thousands of instances of "that." :ROFL:

Like, "Did you know that Bob went to the store?" It sounds more realistic to say "Did you know Bob went to the store?" Nobody uses the grammatically correct form of the sentence.

happywritermom · Mar 24, 2010

I was a full-time journalist for 11 years and I've been freelancing/writing fiction/book editing for 10 years. For me, the hardest part of the transition was letting go of my objectivity and finding a narrative voice. I pursued a master's in creative writing part time while I was still a journalist and that helped tremendously. It forced me to get over it.

I definitely write too fast and I often need to go back and layer my writing more. But, overall, I think my experiences in journalism have made me a better fiction writer. I have always been fascinated ny human nature and journalism, especially crime reporting, gave me the opportunity to investigate it first-hand. I also take criticism well and I am disciplined when I finally get the chance to sit down and write.

I do have that awful habit of editing too much and too often and I'm working on that. But, then again, journalism has taught me to be objective as an editor. I was always one of those reporters who preferred to cut my own copy rather than have someone else butcher it. So editors tended to give precise lengths to write to. If they said 10 inches, I gave them 10 inches and that often meant making some hard decisions about what to keep and what to toss. I had to delete two defendants from my novel and I was heartless about it. I wouldn't let myself whimper and I think that was huge benefit to the novel.

Vomaxx · Mar 24, 2010

Novelists use serial commas.

RJK · Mar 24, 2010

Michael Connelly and John (Camp) Sandford were both accomplished journalists before writing their first novels. They are my favorite authors. I think their journalistic style has carried over to their fiction just enough to make their novels fast paced and packed with action.

I try to mimic them in my writing.

ejwriter · Mar 24, 2010

count me in as another journalist/novelist!
except, instead of making a big career transition from one to the other, i make it nightly.

AND i write for tv news, so talk about keeping it tight and not getting to use any pretty language! i envy those newspaper reporters with their adjectives and those long flowing paragraphs.

but i don't struggle to move from one kind of writing to the other. if anything, my day job helps tremendously with spelling and grammar, and my fiction writing helps keep me creative when writing for work.
writing straightforward news all day also makes me eager to come home and say something with a little more... personality.

plus.... work is an endless source of story ideas.

Noah Body · Mar 24, 2010

RJK said:
Michael Connelly and John (Camp) Sandford were both accomplished journalists before writing their first novels. They are my favorite authors. I think their journalistic style has carried over to their fiction just enough to make their novels fast paced and packed with action.

I try to mimic them in my writing.

Well, with regards to Connelly, I hope your characters at least use contractions when they speak. His folks oftentimes talk like robots.

Claudia Gray · Mar 25, 2010

Most of what I brought over from journalism has been more helpful to me than harmful. For instance, a lot of aspiring novelists are way too shy of editing their own work or having it edited; after a few years of journalism, you develop a much thicker skin! And finding the telling detail or anecdote is critical in both fields. I think it's a great starting point.

erinbee · Mar 25, 2010

Ditto on the thicker skin. I could never have survived the brutality of my road to publication without years of constant rejection and insane editing when I was freelancing

From journalist to novelist

Rambler

Toughen up.

They put those words in my head!

Clever title pending.

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

"Bear trumps Elephants!"

Toughen up.

Court Jester

They put those words in my head!

Lost in mental space.

The cake is a lie. But still cake.

Entertainment Ronin

Ooo! Shiny new cover!

Sheriff Bullwinkle the Poet says:

lurk & learn

Entertainment Ronin

slanted and enchanted