What Journalism Can Teach You About Writing Fiction

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If journalism is the first rough draft of history, fiction is where a writer gets to rewrite that draft and reorder the world to his or her liking. Journalists who write fiction enjoy the best of both worlds, which might be one reason there are so many of us writing mysteries and thrillers. “In journalism if you make stuff up you get fired. In fiction if you don’t make stuff up you get sued,” said Brad Parks, who has written eleven thrillers that have garnered numerous awards (Shamus, Nero, Lefty) after a career writing sports, news, and features for the Newark Star-Ledger and The Washington Post.

Although many journalists turn to writing fiction after long and distinguished careers with news organizations, I’m the oddball exception. My path to journalism came through a back door when my husband, a radio journalist with the Voice of America, was sent to Geneva, Switzerland in the mid-1980s to open a news bureau at the European headquarters of the United Nations. I had quit my job as an economist at the U.S. Senate and was at loose ends as a stay-at-home new mom who needed to learn French. Before long several of André’s colleagues discovered that I had writing experience in my previous life on Capitol Hill and began sending freelance work my way. Five years later we were transferred to Moscow in the waning days of the Soviet Union where good jobs fell off trees. I was soon hired as the resident correspondent for ABC News Radio, the only time in my life I got a job I didn’t apply for, not to mention one for which my only qualification was being married to a radio journalist.

I wrote Moscow Nights, my first novel, during my husband’s final overseas assignment in London after a literary agent in New York told me she couldn’t possibly sell another memoir on life in the former Soviet Union because the market was awash in manuscripts from Communist Party officials and military officers who were trying to cash in and peddle their stories. “Make it up,” she wrote on the bottom of her form rejection letter. “You’ll have better luck.”

Back home in the US for keeps in the late 1990s, I worked on a second novel after Moscow Nights was published in Britain. This time I wanted to be published at home, a goal that would take another five years to accomplish. In the meantime, I began writing regional feature stories for The Washington Post. My editor, a friend and former AP Moscow correspondent, hired me over coffee at Starbucks during a get-together after she’d read my manuscript and offered her comments.

My peripatetic and somewhat erratic career in journalism is not typical, but it did help me in many ways when I began writing fiction full-time. I was curious whether other journalists who had earned their chops the old-fashioned way, with degrees in journalism followed by careers at news organizations, had learned some of the same lessons I had. So I did what any journalist does: I interviewed a few people. Not surprisingly, everyone’s answers confirmed what I already believed. Many of our habits as journalists translate well into writing fiction.

Here are a few of them:

The habit of meeting deadlines. “The six o’clock news is on at six o’clock whether my story is fabulous or just good enough,” Hank Phillippi Ryan, an award-winning television journalist, wrote. Ryan, winner of thirty-seven Emmys during her forty-three-year career with WHDH in Boston, is also the USA Today bestselling author of fourteen thrillers.

LynDee Walker, who spent eight years with four newspapers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and has written fifteen thrillers, said meeting deadlines is just as true in print journalism. “No news editor cares if your muse is quiet today, so journalism teaches quickly that you write when you need to, not just when you want to,” she said.

In addition to not waiting for the fairy dust to settle on your shoulders or the planets to align correctly before you start writing, Dan Fesperman, a bestselling author and reporter for The Baltimore Sun and The Evening Sun, said that years of working under deadline “teach you to become a pretty decent estimator of when you’ll be able to deliver a manuscript.” It also teaches discipline. Fesperman, who had assignments in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, kept his day job while writing his first three novels before quitting to write fiction full-time.

The habit—and skill—of writing clearly and understanding story structure. In an era where colleges and universities no longer offer English as a major because of declining enrollment and people are increasingly communicating with emojis, journalism stands out as one of the few careers with the essential requirement that you must have a good command of English. Al Pessin, a former Voice of America radio correspondent who had assignments in Washington, New York, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Beijing, Jerusalem, and London over a multi-decade spanning career, said that “the ability to write clear, concise, grammatically correct sentences is the most basic [skill]. Also, the ability to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end [that has] characters, conflict, and resolutions.”

Hank Phillippi Ryan, who wrote two series featuring journalists and five standalones, said, “Over all these years as a reporter, I’ve studied the structure of a good story, the rhythm and the music, the suspense, making sure people care, and the need to be entertaining and enlightening at the same time. And that translates perfectly into fiction.”

She’s right. Although my background is mostly in print journalism, my stint with ABC Radio in Moscow also taught me that a story sounds different than it reads. As a result, I read all my books out loud—mostly to my cat, who is usually sleeping next to my desk and therefore an obliging audience—before I turn them in to my editor. Listening to my words I hear the clunky phrases, doubled words, and awkward sentences that I missed when I was reading the book on a computer screen.

The habit of observation. A lesson I quickly learned at The Washington Post was what my editor called “Don’t forget to get the name of the dog.” In other words, take copious notes about everything because you never know what tiny detail will be important for your story once you get back to your desk. Invariably it was something insignificant like the name or breed of the dog belonging to the person you interviewed. And if you didn’t have that information, you needed to make a few phone calls because the corollary of “take notes about everything” is that in journalism you’ve got to get your facts right.

According to Dan Fesperman, whose thirteen bestselling thrillers have won two Dagger awards from the UK Crime Writers Association and the Dashiell Hammett Prize from the International Association of Crime Writers, reporting “was probably the dark horse of [my] transition to novelist because it honed my powers of observation . . . if you’re doing your job right, you’re meeting a lot of people from a lot of different walks of life, which gives you a feel for the various ways people talk, interact, deal with their problems, deal with their fears and insecurities, their gripes and grievances.”

Which leads me to the habit of listening. Hank Phillippi Ryan and Al Pessin wrote about the unique importance of listening because sound is integral in television and radio. “I thought writing dialogue [in fiction] would be a challenge, but it wasn’t,” Pessin wrote. “I think all those years of transcribing interviews and choosing actualities [sound bites] helped.”  And Ryan, who occasionally went undercover for her investigative stories, has been known to wear wires to record what she saw and heard.

“I spent years really listening to a wide swath of different people when they talked, writing down what they said and sometimes how they said it, and I credit that every time I get a compliment on the dialogue in my books,” said LynDee Walker, who wrote two series about a journalist in Richmond, Virginia and a female Texas Ranger.

Getting people to talk is yet another skill, or what Brad Parks called journalism’s “secret weapon of research.” “Most people love to talk about themselves,” he said. “All you have to do is say, ‘I’m interested, tell me more.’”

The habit of revision. Journalists not only have deadlines, we have well-defined limits. A thirty-three second piece for ABC Radio News that included my sign-off. A seven-hundred-and-fifty word feature story for The Washington Post—any longer and there was a good chance some copy editor who needed to make my content fit the space allocated for it would lop off the last paragraph.

“I love to cut,” Hank Phillippi Ryan wrote. “I shoot maybe twenty hours of video for a tv story—and only use three minutes of that. In tv, I learned to enjoy the editing process, and revel in seeing the taut sharp important story emerge from all the excess.”

With so many habits that transferred well from writing facts to making up fiction, I asked everyone whether there were there any liabilities.

Yes, one big one, and it’s what you’d expect: making the mental shift from hewing strictly to facts to having the freedom to completely make things up.

Dan Fesperman, who admitted it took him a while to fully free up his imagination, said that convincing himself he was in full command of his material and no longer had to be chained to what he’d written in a reporter’s notebook was the most difficult aspect of transitioning from journalist to novelist. LynDee Walker wrote a first novel so full of purple prose and flowery adjectives that she keeps a copy in her attic to remind her what not to do. Brad Parks still has moments where he feels everything in his novel needs to be double-sourced. Hank Phillippi Ryan’s ‘aha” moment came when she was creating a reporter as a main character and realized she wasn’t writing about herself. “I hate to drive,” she wrote. “But she didn’t have to hate to drive.”

“Making things up is a great freedom, but also a burden,” Al Pessin said. “There are no facts or timelines to work from.”

My final question was whether anyone based a novel on a story they had covered. Write what you know, right?

The answer: all of us.

Entire scenes in Moscow Nights came straight from the journal I kept in Russia; the story was about—what else?—an American journalist sent to Moscow when one of her colleagues dies mysteriously. Brad Parks’ first six novels are about a reporter who covers crime in Newark, N.J. and he was, not coincidentally, a reporter who covered crime in Newark. LynDee Walker, who lives in Richmond, wrote nine Nichelle Clarke thrillers about a reporter who works for The Richmond Telegraph; Devil in the Deadline is based on a story she wrote about Texas televangelist compounds. Dan Fesperman’s first novel Lie in the Dark grew directly out of his first reporting trip to the besieged city of Sarajevo in early 1994.

Al Pessin’s stories are based on the years he covered the Pentagon for VOA: specifically an American citizenship ceremony he witnessed by chance in the Pentagon courtyard when he noticed a number of individuals in US military uniforms among a group of people in colorful ethnic clothing, all of whom were taking their citizenship oaths. He wrote that until seeing that ceremony it hadn’t occurred to him that citizenship wasn’t a requirement for joining the military—you only needed to be a US resident—which then fueled his determination to write about the immigrants who fought for their adopted country. He has since written three thrillers featuring an Afghan-American US army officer who uses his ethnicity and language skills to go undercover against America’s enemies.

Hank Phillippi Ryan said that while her novels are not her television stories made into fiction, her books and reporting have a common thematic throughline about the search for truth and the meaning of justice.

“I’m always in search of the new story, right?” she said. “If I knew the ending of a news story it wouldn’t be new. So in writing fiction, I’m not afraid of the unknown. I’m comfortable with being in search of the story and have confidence that eventually I’ll be able to discover the satisfying ending.”

Ultimately, as Ryan says, journalism and fiction are about storytelling. My New York editor at ABC News used to say that if my story didn’t grab a listener’s attention within the first few seconds, they’d either change stations, or worse, turn their radio off. So I knew I didn’t have much time to hook someone before I lost them completely because the thought of talking to no one terrified me. It’s also what has driven my fiction ever since.

Hoping I have written a good story well told.

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