Journalist’s lessons in creative writing

Neeraj SK

I hurriedly rushed out of the smelly, sweaty and congested newsroom to receive the call of one of my sources who was impatiently and incessantly continued calling me after I had rejected his call three times in a row.

“Sir, I found the drug peddler”, I hear my source’s breathless voice.

This call had led to the publication of my first exclusive crime report as a journalist. But more interestingly, this article inspired a second layer of plot in my novel and helped me complete 50K words in my first NaNoWriMo attempt. That is when I realised that my short-term endeavour (of about three years) in journalism had made me into a much better writer.

I neither had planned on becoming a journalist, nor was I trained to be one. However, fate got me a job as a journalist at a highly reputed newspaper and so I began learning the principles of writing good newspaper articles. Little did I know that this newfound knowledge would seep into my fiction writing, making me a much better teller of tales.

I share some of these lessons with you, hoping it would help you just as much as it helped me.

1. The inverted pyramid of journalism

People always skim through newspaper articles and dive deep only into those articles that truly intrigue them. That is why, journalists always write their articles in the structure of an inverted pyramid, wherein the most important and intriguing information goes in the first paragraph, which is followed by paragraphs with descending importance of information and increasing fluff.

The inverted pyramid starts with a paragraph that answers the five ‘W’ questions – Who, What, When, Where and Why – followed by a few crisp paragraphs detailing the incident being reported. It is only after the crucial information is given in these paragraphs, does a journalist add some additional details, which is followed by a final concluding paragraph.

As we live in a world where artists compete for the audience’s attention span, the inverted pyramid becomes a really handy tool for creating natural hooks for your stories and ensuring that the stories are crisp and to the point with minimum fluff that will always slide down to the very end.

2. Writing on cue

As a newbie journalist, I considered deadlines and word counts as my worst enemies. As a journalist, most days I was expected to find a newsworthy story, conduct interviews, do field research and write an article ready to be sent to the editor in less two to three hours.

However, this experience helped me get out of the comfort zone of waiting for the muse (which is just a fancy phrase for procrastination) and start writing on cue. While I still fall prey to procrastination every now and then, I now am at least confident that I can literally start writing a story on cue without having to wait for my muse to strike.

3. Creating intriguing characters

As a part of my job, I have interviewed a considerable number of people across age groups, cultures and classes. These were the ‌kind of interviews that were never planned ahead and I had to ask just the right ‌questions based entirely on what the other person was saying. Goof interviews were those where the questions and answers felt like actions and reactions between me and the interviewee.

This habit of forming conversational sentences based not on what I have planned but on what the other person is saying, helped me understand how to write good dialogues because it turns out that natural sounding dialogues are also supposed to sound like a series of actions and reactions between the characters in a story.

5. Finding my voice

As a writer, finding my author’s voice was one of the most difficult things for me. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what ‘author voice’ even means.

However, when I became a journalist, I realised ‌it is only on rare occasions that I will get to write my name (byline) below an article that I have written. Most articles that do not have any exclusive content are published without a byline in almost all newspapers. This meant that if I wanted newspaper readers to know that a certain article is written by me, I had to style my writing uniquely with the consistent use of tools like word choices, sentence structures, figures of speech and signature phrases or terms.

Little did I know that simply by applying these same tools in my fiction writing, I had already formed my unique author voice.

My journalism has had such a great impact on my writing that I am certain I would never have become a published author if I had not been a journalist first.

Always remember that writing comes from within and ‘the within’ is made up entirely of your conscious and subconscious experiences. So, make sure you live a full life and value and learn from every moment of it, for that will turn into a story one day.