4 things journalists bring to fiction

If journalism’s gifts to fiction can be as varied as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather and Donald Barthelme, distiling the tools that separate them from other fiction writers is an exercise in hedging. Kinda this, a lot of that but not always …

After some hurried research for a presentation on narrative journalism to a writing workshop, though, I settled on four common characteristics:

1. Regular people

Isabel Wilkerson wrote of narrative journalism, “We need people, ultimately. We need a sympathetic protagonist, who is flawed and hopefully recognizes it …, who is caught up in the sweep of something bigger than him or herself. It’s our responsibility to make the readers see the fullness of the character that we’ve come up with and to see themselves in him or her and to make them care about what happens to him or her. I prefer to write about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.”

From Daniel Defoe to Dickens to today, journalists tend to bring the same logic to fiction. The use of regular people, not knights in shining armor, is one way that the birth of the English novel is defined, with Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe.” Not to say that no reporter has ever written a novel about angels or sentient robots, of course. But journalists seem to find inspiration from the Common Man.

I suspect that being a reporter teaches you that ordinary people often have interesting stories. And when they don’t, the reporter fights the temptation to make them interesting with just a little tweak here or there to the truth.

2. Lists

Part of the realism/naturalism formula is to describe external things, to provide tiny details of how a job is done. What I noted in many journalist’s fiction is more specific: the use of lists. Dickens used that technique in his journalism as well as fiction; this is from one of his character sketches: “On a board, at the side of the door, are placed about 20 books, all odd volumes, and as many wine glasses — all different patterns; several locks, an old earthenware pan, full of rusty keys, two or three gaudy chimney-ornaments — cracked, of course; … a round frame like a capital O, which has once held a mirror; a flute, complete with the exception of the middle joint; a pair of curling-irons, and a tinder box.”

Lists of objects are comfortable for reporters; they fit the idea that we are mere cameras recording a scene without interpretation. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s critique of Joan Didion accuses her of being that simplistic. After a passage in which a character realizes that the answer to every question is ‘nothing,” Didion “segues to “Damson plums, apricot preserves, Sweet India relish and pickled peaches. Apple chutney. Summer squash succotash.” That juxtaposition of nihilism with all the ripeness and plenitude of the physical world — the emptiness/cornucopia syndrome — is what passes for style. (Any recital, litany, of fruits, vegetables, and old- fashioned flowers is evocative — although, with Didion, we are never sure of what; anyone can learn to do it: read a Burpee catalogue.)”

But Dickens’ list provides more than an inventory. The books, none in full sets; the mismatched glasses; the flute missing a piece — does he have to tell the reader that this is the room of someone who may once have led a cultured life, but no longer?

Looking over my own attempts at fiction, I may be guilty of Burpee writing as well. In my defense and that of others — even Dickens had Walter Bagehot complaining, “He describes the figs which are sold, but not the talent which sells figs well” — life is not always neatly gathered into items ripe with symbolism. Lists provide a way to demonstrate the randomness of reality.

3. Exposition

Narrative is about scenes, as I wrote last week. Show, don’t tell. When you want to report on a small fire that did little damage, though, setting the scene amid the gentle curves of a suburban cul-de-sac and focusing on the clutched fingers of an elderly homeowner watching her family’s fondest memories get lightly singed is not likely to please the editor or the readers. In fiction, trying to fit all the background in via dialogue or character actions can get contrived, and allotting whole scenes to establishing a backstory can take the focus off the central tale.

In last week’s post, I included the passage below when talking about how journalists may include too many specifics in narratives. However, I also think this is a good example of how to efficiently provide background through exposition. The series was about a woman who’s given a fatal diagnosis, and follows her to her death. We want to know who she — Lisa — was, but not at the expense of the central theme. So, this, from an early narrative by Connie Schultz:

Lisa was shy as a child, a real homebody who rarely went to sleepovers. She sobbed when she left home for college in the fall of 1974. She blossomed, though, at Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, Va., where she pursued a major in history, only 50 miles from her parents’ home in Vienna, Va.

As her confidence grew, Lisa became more outgoing and eager to get out into the world. By the time she graduated in 1978, she decided to pursue a career in business, starting out at a mortgage loan company in Washington, D.C.

Lisa loved clothes. She used her first paycheck to buy a fur coat, and spent many after that on expensive, classic designer clothes. At 5-feet-6, 115 pounds, she looked as elegant in blue jeans as evening dresses, and she loved getting dolled up to go out.

4. Clarity

It’s a common argument that journalists who turn to fiction write shorter, less complex sentences than their non-journalistic colleagues, because that’s what they learned while reporting. That’s one of those truths that works only if you concentrate on the extremes of the bell curves and not on the vast area of overlap. A lot of Hemingway’s reportage contains longer, more convoluted sentences than his fiction. In another post, I included side-by-side examples of his journalistic and fictional accounts of a scene; the second was much more concise.

One of the space savings: many fewer adjectives and adverbs. Those showed up in the reporting, Shelly Fisher Fishkin suggests, because they “relieve the reader of the task of coming up with his own responses to the scene the writer painted.” I like the gentle sarcasm there. Indeed, much of our job as journalists has seemed to be to relieve the readers of burdens — the burden of nuance, the burden of discernment.

Certainly that can be overdone, and it works to disengage the reader from the words, just as TV puts fewer demands on the audience’s imagination than radio drama did. But clarity widens the potential audience for writing, and most journalism has been about reaching a mass audience. Short, uncluttered sentences are just part of that.

A cautionary note: We journalists like to think of our drive for clarity as serving the readers. There’s also an element of control, though. The adjectives in Hemingway’s reporting didn’t just relieve the reader of a burden; they worked to ensure that the reader got the same impression of the scene, took away the same lessons that the writer did. Short sentences leave less room for interpretation.

As I work on some creative writing, I’m reminded of the way newspaper designers — a breed that, I certainly believe, have their own control issues — tackled web design. The internet is a fluid environment; every browser may be open to a different width and height, fonts may differ, screen resolutions vary. This was torture to print-trained designers (confession: I was one of them) who were used to specifying the exact size and placement of everything on a page. I saw a lot of attempts to force a static design on a dynamic medium. As writers, I think, journalists face some of the same issues when approaching fiction.

Fiction readers (at least in most genres) are used to doing some of their own interpretation. I’ve fought against my own urge to drive my points home with a sledgehammer if necessary. Again, I know that journalists aren’t the only ones who struggle with this. But I have to wonder if Barthelme’s background at the Houston Post had some influence on passages like one near the end of “Me and Miss Mandible,” a short story about a 35-year-old man who is reassigned from his insurance adjusting job to a cramped seat in a sixth-grade classroom. The story is told through journal entries, with a voice that reminded me of Elwood P. Dowd in “Harvey” — gentle, easy-going but quietly savvy. There’s an obvious message throughout about our unwillingness to question authority — or question anything at all. But near the end, just in case readers might have missed the various neon alerts along the way (Last Theme Element for Next 2 Paragraphs), there’s this:

We read signs as promises. Miss Mandible understands by my great height, by my resonant vowels, that I will one day carry her off to bed. Sue Ann interprets these same signs to mean that I am unique among her male acquaintances, therefore most desirable, therefore her special property as is every thing that is Most Desirable. If neither of these propositions work out then life has broken faith with them.

I myself, in my former existence, read the company motto (“Here to Help in Time of Need”) as a description of the duty of the adjuster, drastically mislocating the company’s deepest concerns. I believed that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love. Brenda, reading the same signs that have now misled Miss Mandible and Sue Ann Brownly, felt she had been promised that she would never be bored again. All of us, Miss Mandible, Sue Ann, myself, Brenda, Mr. Goodykind, still believe that the American flag betokens a kind of general righteousness.

But I say, looking about me in this incubator of future citizens, that signs are signs, and that some of them are lies. This is the great discovery of my time here.