On the surface, it would seem that news writing and fiction writing are poles apart. One is concerned with truth and fact, the other with making stuff up, respectively.
However, I would attest that they are nearer than we think.
When I was a 15-year-old on work experience at my local newspaper, one of the senior reporters asked why I wanted to be a journalist. I said it was because I love writing, to which he smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s not about writing,’ he said, ‘it’s about the story. Finding and telling the story.’
And over my career as a journalist, I kept this at the front of my mind. It’s the story that matters.
This is very much the case with fiction. Writers spend hours/weeks/months pulling together a plot that makes sense but keeps the reader guessing.
The distance between them becomes ever shorter when you consider that both are based on what’s known as ‘the 5Ws’. By that I mean: who, what, where, when and, most importantly, why. I think we can safely say that the last W is the one that interests us most in both fact and fiction.
In fact, the biggest difference between news and fiction writing is in how you tell the story.
How versus why
News reporting is all upfront – you tell the story as quickly as possible and with as few words as possible. A news story that is well written will give you all you need to know in the first sentence. One reason for this is that the formula for writing a news story is an inverted pyramid; all the important stuff at the top. This dates back to the good old days when subeditors worked on paper and if the space was too short for the story, they chop the story starting from the bottom until it fits. You don’t want to lose the key thrust of the story to the subbie’s Stanley knife!
So, you grab the reader immediately and give them the complete story ASAP.
Fiction may also have a formula in plotting – which changes depending on your genre – to fulfil the expectations of the reader. You have much more space to tell your story, but (and it’s a big but) you still need to grab the attention as soon as possible to keep the reader turning the pages. There are a lot of books in the world and readers will ditch a book if it hasn’t grabbed them within a few chapters.
Once you’ve got them, you can take a bit more time to weave the story, decide what to reveal and when, but it’s important to keep the plot ticking along. I write short chapters at the beginning and end of my books to pull the reader along and make it harder to put down.
All about the people
Another similarity between news and fiction is that the best stories centre on people. It goes without saying that people want to read about other people. For example, a story about the cost-of-living crisis featuring a comment from the Government is dull – but when you bring in 70-year-old Maureen who has to choose between eating or heating her home, it becomes more interesting because you really feel for her.
Characters are key in fiction. A plot doesn’t work without characters. If you can get readers to gel with your characters – whether it’s a protagonist or an antagonist – then you’re onto a winner. Readers don’t have to like characters, they just need to engage with them.
Bringing a balance
There’s also a level of fairness needed in both news and fiction. For example, a journalist has to give both sides of the story. This gives readers a chance to make up their own mind on the issue at hand. Fiction readers also expect fairness from authors. If you’re picking up a crime novel, then you expect to get some violence or deadly peril (trigger warnings on TV crime dramas always make me chuckle). Equally, readers want the chance to solve the crime themselves and take a dim view if the ending of a book is such that they couldn’t possibly have worked it out.
There is an element of readers turning to fiction as an escape from the news. After all, in crime fiction, the baddies tend to get their comeuppance and justice is done, which isn’t always the case in real life.
Sometimes it feels that truth is stranger than fiction, but I’ll still always prefer writing crime to writing the news.
If you want to find out more about the Allensbury Mysteries, check out My Books.