Intersections: Some thoughts on Journalism and Fiction
JA
January 12
Journalism and fiction-writing often seem to go hand in hand for many authors – think Geraldine Brooks, Helen Garner, Kenneth Cook, Joan Didion, Arundhati Roy, Hunter S. Thompson, Graham Greene, Italo Calvino, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens to name but a haphazard few. Over at American Fiction Notes, Mark Athitakis has touched briefly on the subject and his two posts bring up some thoughtful questions on the interplay between the two professions. How much, for example, does a career in the newsroom help or hinder you as a novelist, and is it still possible to make a clear distinction between the two given the rise of ‘gonzo’ style journalism and the increasingly popular genre of literary non-fiction?
It’s easy, first of all, to see why so many writers gravitate towards both professions. Research skills as well as the ability to meet deadlines and immerse yourself in different worlds obviously lend themselves to both fiction and hard news. Similarly, regular work as a journalist can often provide the steady income many writers need to survive.
Regarding the question of overlap, however, there is one interesting observation that seems to crop up again and again in terms of the desire to present a certain kind of ‘truth’. Many writers who worked in both fields seemed to feel that journalism’s demands that one remain loyal to the facts constrained them at times, whereas in fiction they were able to work within wider parameters that allowed them to focus the truth of the entire experience, rather than the reality. In an interview about her latest novel, The Spare Room, Helen Garner, who has been a chameleon of genres throughout her prolific career, had this to say:
Even if the story that you're writing has its origins in real experience, in fiction you're free to pull in material from the rest of your life and especially as you get older you've got this stash of experience and it sort of springs to life in your imagination. It's as if the story that you're telling is porous and all this other kind of material can come surging in to enrich it as you go.
Geraldine Brooks, who worked for many years as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, also added that ‘as a reporter, if you don't know the truth, you can't write it, but in fiction you can make it up. It's wonderful when you hit that void, and you've got all the facts – that's your scaffolding, and now you can make your edifice.’
In his post, Athitakis also suggested that the two disciplines were clearly ‘not nearly the same’, yet it seems to me that there is actually a great deal of overlap. Take Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, for example, which is based on tragic true events. Didion, with her background in journalism, presents all the facts and dates as one would expect, yet in a way that was so lyrical and meandering that her book read like a novel. Similarly, Garner, who is constantly dogged by questions about the autobiographical nature of her novels, was once confronted by a journalist ‘up in arms’ about the ambiguous nature of her book The Spare Room, in which the protagonist is also a writer named Helen in her mid-sixties, living in Melbourne’s north: ‘She had a fundamentalist concept of what fiction is, that if it's called a novel, it had to be invented, and that if you hadn't made it all up, you were doing something wrong in calling it a novel.’ However, Garner says that the delineations between reportage and journalism are no longer clear to her:
Now that I've written something that I'm calling a novel . . . I realise [that the line between fiction and non-fiction] is not really a border… It's more like a kind of spectrum, and you can move along it in various directions.
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Comments
12 Jan 10 at 12:15
Great article. I wrote something on this very topic not long ago- "Ten reasons Journalists make great authors": http://withextrapulp.com.au/?p=399
...12 Jan 10 at 13:38
Garner has admitted that she did essentially publish her diary as Monkey Grip. This, along with her forays into "journalism", either suggests that the delineation has actually never been clear to her at all or that it moves when it suits Helen. And only ever Helen.
...12 Jan 10 at 14:15
I think the most helpful thing is the discipline of journalism when it seeps into fiction writing. Deadlines. Paragraphs that must have a point. Consideration for the reader. Someone (I'm embarrassed I can't remember who) once told me: 'The craft informs the art'. True, for me at least.
...12 Jan 10 at 14:42
I agree with what Toni has said. Concise writing is so important to journalism and can really help in fiction writing when it's sometimes too easy to let sentences drag on.
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