Some years ago, a colleague at the financial magazine where I was working said to me, “No matter what else, we can always be proud that we’ve earned our living with our pens.”
Over the past four decades, my trusty pen (or laptop) has taken me on some convoluted journeys through FDA drug trials, consumer boycotts, national political conventions, multibillion-dollar pension fund investments, and even Poland during World War II – via newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books, and novels. And surprisingly, the writing hasn’t been all that different.
When I first branched out from journalism to fiction, about seven years ago, it was wonderfully liberating: I didn’t have to be accurate anymore! No more checking and triple-checking dates, names, quotes, and chronologies.
As I learned, however, that’s not completely true. While a novelist has the freedom to create her own dates, names, quotes, and chronologies, she generally needs to keep all those creations consistent. If the protagonist Miranda has wavy brown hair in Chapter One, she’d better still have wavy brown hair in Chapter Five unless the author has deliberately introduced a color change or hair-straightening into the plot.
Suddenly, I was drawing up charts and timelines for my novels, not so unlike the spreadsheets I’d laid out for my nonfiction books.
Another jolt of fact-checking reality: Even though I don’t write strictly historical fiction, my novels thus far have been set in specific places, at specific times. That means I need to maintain basic historical accuracy. In my newest book, I Meant to Tell You, I might fudge on whether a non-techie would own a laptop in 2003 (laptops didn’t outsell desktops until 2005), but I couldn’t alter big events, like the student takeover at Columbia University in April 1968 or the Amazin’ Mets World Series win in 1969.
My years of journalism thus came in handy, although I probably overdid the research. I may be the only person who’s ever gone to Ellis Island, not to look for my ancestors’ shipboard records, but to study the colors and materials of the museum’s floors, walls, benches, and chandeliers.
Thanks to the wide range of places I’d written for during my journalism career, in addition to my nonfiction books, I wasn’t welded to a rigid “five W’s” style. But what almost all the publications had in common was the ever-present pressure to “write tight.” Reporters are always cutting, cutting, cutting -- tossing out reams of hard-earned research to fit a shrinking news hole. I just don’t know how to unspool a description or languidly describe a character’s face, the way fiction allows.
In short (ahem), I’m too succinct. None of my novels has yet to breach 300 pages.
There’s one more thing that remains unchanged, whether it’s a newspaper article, a nonfiction book, or a novel: The thrill – and terror -- of seeing my words in print and knowing that people might read them.
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