Deadlines and Discipline

If you have typically written for newspapers and magazines, what was the transition like for you when you wrote a novel?* 

I always wanted to be a novelist. I also understood it's not a 'paid profession'. I knew I needed a trade so I did a journalism cadetship on a small newspaper in Sydney and worked my way up to become the subeditor, then the editor. Next, I spent several years working on a teen girls magazine where I was the chief subeditor. This was followed by a job on the subbing desk of daily newspaper The Courier Mail in Brisbane. I liked working in news and magazine rooms. I liked the buzz, the people, the fast pace. 

Throughout this time - early mornings before work, late nights after work - I was writing novel drafts. Certainly, what I learned in the newsroom helped shape my writing style. 

Writing journalism is formulaic. You write to the inverted pyramid model, which means you start with the most important bit, and then add layers of information, in order of importance. The idea is that a busy subeditor can cut your story from the bottom up. Ideally, they could cut off any number of sentences from below, and the story above would still make sense. You need to provide the facts: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How. And, most crucially, when the reader has finished the story, they shouldn't have any questions. No plot holes. 

My novel writing style is quite journalistic. The risk with that, is that the writing is too bare. Early on, I learnt to slow my prose down, to let the story breathe. This was something I had to work at. Smells, memories, textures, emotions and lush descriptions are often not included in a hard news story, unless it's a colour quote from an interviewee. 

I also have a terrible habit of over-researching for my novels. Fact checking and triple checking things. I'm always reminding myself of Stephen King's advice about story coming first. For example, the history of a crumbling stone colonial building beside a river in the Tasmanian highlands doesn't really matter as much as the actions of the person who has arrived there to bury a body. 

Writing crime, or writing journalism, have similarities. A journalist must be curious and determined, and they also need to have empathy and integrity to do their job well. These are qualities that many crime fiction writers share. 

Crime writers and readers, just like journalists and their readers, desire to know the truth. Writing journalism, you're tasked with laying out the facts and letting the reader make their mind up. A good journalist gathers as many facts as they can, and arranges them in a way that is fair, and makes sense. They must ask tough questions, in order to get real answers. They can't embellish, or dramatise. The facts are all that is required. 

Deadlines and discipline are ingrained in me - I never waste my writing time. That's a good skill to have. Writing short - that's a skill I need to continue to practise.

Honestly, I wasn't a great news reporter. Often, I felt sorry for the mayor or a politician. When we were trying to dig up dirt on them, and expose them for the fun of a good headline, I felt mean. Journalists need to be tough. In the magazine world, I didn't like how we put our integrity aside for the sake of advertisers. Magazines are full of product placement, sometimes in very subtle ways. We'd push products on the teen readership, often playing on their anxieties about personal hygiene, appearance or wellbeing in doing so. I'm not completely proud of being part of that business model. 

I like fiction because it's more nuanced, and also, perpetrators often get punished in satisfying ways. Fiction mirrors real life, it's murky, morally complex, emotional and revealing. Crime fiction writers ask deeper questions, we might even ask the reader to empathise with a perpetrator, to walk in their shoes for a while, for example. Our role is to not just solve the crime, but to examine the consequences of the crime - what's the cost of justice, how are people affected by this, what does crime to a person. If you look at any village, town or city, the type of crimes that occur there are very revealing about what kind of place it is. Crime is a way to understand human nature, and to explore the ways that bad behaviour effects people and societies. 

*I tweaked this question to personalise it. The original question was: If you have typically written short stories and then wrote longer (novels or novellas), what was the transition like for you, and how did you teach yourself to take the leap and go long? 

But I've never written short stories, except in high school, and once when I wrote a story about a farmer from Cunnamulla and his awful children, a story that was submitted to, and rejected by the New Yorker. Being rejected by the New Yorker is an achievement and I saved my rejection letter as a writerly milestone.