How do I fiction?

How to move from journalism to fiction writing. Or in other words, writing when you're a professional writer but somehow you can't write creatively

Dear Sonal,

I am a writer and political commentator. I’ve written for major media outlets including the Washington Post, The Globe and Mail and Jacobin. I’ve given commentary on television, radio and podcasts. I have a PhD in political science and I’ve published a non-fiction book about why people make irrational political decisions.

I’m working on some fiction right now, and it’s awkward to admit this as a person who writes for a living, but it’s not going well. I actually wrote a draft last year and sent it to my agent, but their notes made me so doubtful of myself, that I scrapped the whole project and started over.

I really enjoy your newsletter and the column about novel writing and outlining helped me feel more solid about my approach, but do you have any other advice for me?

Sincerely,
Actual For Real Journalist

Dear Actual For Real Journalist,

(who is in fact David Moscorp, who did not write me this letter but replied to me with one nice sentence about an earlier column whereupon I got excited because I’m a big fan of his political writing (cue fangirling, and FFS, Sonal, can you be more nerdy?) and so after a brief and polite email exchange, I went ahead and dumped several paragraphs’ worth of unasked-for advice upon him, which he graciously received, and subsequently permitted me to re-form and reuse that conversation, including making up a question that I hope resembles his thoughts at the time, and offered to include his real name, because evidently, I am not entirely embarrassing??? (How?) Anyhoo….)

Before I get into the advice-ing thing, readers of this column might not know that I am an off-and-on political junkie (on because The Drama, off because there’s only so many dumpster fire fumes I can inhale) and so like, I just want to put it out there that if Dave (or someone!) were to tell me all the dirt that all the political journalists know but don’t print, I would not breathe a word of it to anyone. Pinky swear!

crickets chirping

Okay, I get it, you have ethics and integrity. Fine. Fine.

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On to the advice part, or in other words, the entire point of this newsletter.

I don’t come from a journalism background, but I did a few years in marcom and corporate communications and even a little technical writing before I finally embraced creative writing, and I think the shift from professional writing to creative (but still professional) writing can be a little weird, in that you spend years being reasonably certain that you’re a good writer, and even being paid a liveable income for it (well, less so that part in journalism) and then you try writing in a different form and now it’s like, wait, what happened, I do this professionally. 

There’s an ease to this kind of professional writing in that you are writing what you know. You’ve done the research, you know the story, you generally know how you’re going to arrange and structure the piece. If there are gaps or unanswered questions, you know what they are and where they will get filled in, and how you will go about finding those answers. To use the shorthand that I’ve picked up from recovering-journalists-turned-fiction-writers I know or have taught, once you’ve worked out the nutgraf, everything else falls into place around it. 

There’s a confidence that comes with writing when you know what all the pieces are, because who doesn’t like the feeling of knowing what they’re doing?

I was a very fast professional writer of this sort, and these fields tend to reward fast and confident writers. I’d know the objective, an effective structure would be immediately clear, and with so many of the decisions made, all I had to do is focus on how to express things.

Fiction is different. In fiction, much of the time, we have no idea what we’re writing.

Even if we’ve outlined the thing to death (don’t recommend, see previous column) or have done a lot of pre-work into who are characters are and what they want or are going to do (do recommend, but historically have not been patient enough to do) or even if we’re writing auto-fiction, the things you have figured out are only a thin slice of the complexities of human behaviour you’re about to explore in the story.

And yet, our characters are real and complex people; they exist as complete beings, and even if we don’t consciously know them, we still have an instinctive sense of what does and doesn’t make sense for them. We all know without verifying it that Tim Walz never met a pun that didn’t make him chuckle, has a complete socket set and it tickles him every time he gets a chance to use it, and has a never-fail method for getting a stuck car out of the snow.

So to with our characters—we might not have specifically decided their histories, their likes and dislikes, but once we know them well enough, we know what fits and what does not, what’s predictable and what’s surprising but still makes sense, etc.

Except that when we start writing, that knowledge is often not yet available to the conscious, logical part of our brain the way the long list of Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s (a.k.a., the Moron in Charge’s) ridiculous proposals are in mine, including the monorail on the waterfront back when he was a city councillor, and no, readers, I’m not confusing politics in Ontario with an episode of The Simpson’s, this happened, we might actually be better off with a cartoon character in charge.

The reason writing fiction is not quite like journalism or corporate communications or other kinds of professional writing is that writing the first draft is part of the research. No matter how much you believe you know about the story before writing it, the first draft (and probably some subsequent drafts) is still research—especially in a big, complex project like a novel.

The first draft is where we get to know our characters by seeing how they live on the page, and learning how their choices will drive the plot, what ideas and themes and images are important to us, and how our initial ideas probably have more nuance and complexity that we first realized.

And some of those initial choices we make, or our characters make, are going to instinctively feel a little fake, or a little wooden, or somehow a little wrong even if it’s technically fine. Then we need to trust in our instincts, in the wild idea that feels a little bit dangerous and uncertain to write, the thing that sounds dumb and unbelievable but somehow has a spark and energy about it, and then explore that to discover some more.

This is the job of the first draft, even if we’ve shifted much of this to pre-work: discovery. This is where we figure out what we know and give our characters room to surprise us. It’s less the writing than process of research (on top of any other research) that you might to for any other large and complex story: the interviewing sources, and reading background information, and looking up details and facts and statistics that needs to be done to figure out what the story is, but also leaves room for the story to surprise us and twist in unexpected ways. Because if we can predict what will happen before we write it, so can the reader.

And so this is why, even though you are a professional writer, you aren’t writing a novel by confidently expressing what you know in the best possible way. You’re sitting with a smidgeon of an idea about what you are writing, and still trying to express it in the best possible way, even though you might have to toss it all out or change everything about it later on, because a random idea pops up that you will not know how to make sense of, but somehow feels right or interesting or exciting, and all you can do is sit in this place of not knowing—what to keep, what to change, how it will all come together—and have faith that somehow this wild mess will work itself out.

This is decidedly less comfortable than being a confident writing professional.

The other bit of discomfort is that fiction writing is frequently more vulnerable than journalism, or many other types of professional writing. (Vulnerability never came up for me when I was writing marketing material about software for life insurance companies; personal disgust at the misuse of my own talents, however…)

There are always going to be parts of you in the story, no matter what you are writing about. There’s no professional distance in good creative writing, no matter how many layers of obfuscation are in the way. The honest truth has a way of making itself felt in writing, and that’s often what makes it more resonant, but writing this way is not always comfortable for the writer, especially if you’ve been trained to not put yourself into the story. 

Often, to manage this discomfort, or simply because stories are complicated and there’s only so much our brains can figure out at a time, we’ll just throw in a placeholder, or something totally cliched but it’s all we can think of at this time, or write something that feels wooden and false but we are not in the mood to go there and we want to doggedly push forward on something, or even that we’re back in the uncertainty mode and have no idea if what we are writing will work or make sense and what the actual fuck, muse, why are we writing fun facts about whales?

This is also still research.

The places that are a bit flat or cliched but went in because you just needed to get things moving are fine in a first draft, because that kind of intense connection to our most instinctive writing selves is hard to sustain for the entirety of the 80,000 words or so that a novel takes. The places where you’re in the zone but you don’t understand what wild nonsense is coming out onto the page are also fine in a first draft. This is why fiction usually takes multiple drafts.

In corporate writing, time was of the essence and I usually would write one draft, proofread and be done with it. The idea that I’d have to go back and revise and revise as many times as it took for fiction—the idea that revision in fiction is not just fixing stuff, but is in fact deepening our discovery of the story—took me very long to accept.

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A Quick Note About Agents & Feedback

As a general rule, sending your first draft of a novel anywhere—aside perhaps from some very trusted writing friends who understand the delicate art of first draft feedback—is going to be rough. It would be like sending your research notes to your editor, and saying “Okay, the article is done, what do you think?”

Full disclosure: I don’t have an agent, but my first novel went to several and got feedback, and now it’s being sent directly to editors and has gotten some feedback as well, (plus I had some direct editorial feedback as part of my prize for that contest thing I was a finalist in) and I’ve noticed some differences.

First, every agent is different, and some can and will offer excellent editorial feedback and others offer perhaps not-so-excellent editorial feedback and others offer nothing at all.

But the big thing I noticed in the agent feedback was that it was geared towards turning my book into something easier to package and sell—and hey, nothing wrong with that, I want my book to sell—but it seemed to me that they didn’t quite get me or the book I was writing. Like, I could take their feedback and have a good book, but it wouldn’t be the story I was writing, it wouldn’t be my voice on the page, it wouldn’t be trusting my instincts as a writer. Apparently my writing instincts are not as commercially viable as my ego and bank account would like them to be, dammit.

(And yes, I am aware that this probably sounds like agent rejection sour grapes and being a super-pretentious artiste, but also maybe I think that it looks like this is my own vulnerabilities showing, because like, who am I, aside from a person who dumps unasked-for writing advice on people who email me to say “I liked your newsletter?”)

But this is the agents job: selling the book. It makes perfect sense that their feedback, even when apt, is tilted that way. (Although really, no one truly knows what books will sell and what will not.) It was not wrong as feedback, so much as it was not quite the right fit for what I was trying to do.

By contrast, the feedback I’ve had from editors has been different, and interestingly, some of the things the agents brought up as issues were not things that came up as issues in my editorial session. Most importantly, I’ve generally felt like the editors who have given me feedback understood the book I was writing, even if they felt like it wasn’t quite ready yet, or that they didn’t love it enough to work with me on it.

Still, while an editor’s job is to make the book better, editors in general are really, really good at identifying problems, but their suggested solutions are not necessarily what is right for the book. It’s the writer’s job to figure out what problem the editor has uncovered, and figure out how to solve it in a way that is authentic to the book they want to write. In the best case scenario, this is a collaborative process.

(Have I written about feedback? No? Does someone want to ask me a question about feedback? Is that a future topic for Writer Therapy Extras?)

But all this is to say: just because your agent, or even your editor says something, doesn’t mean that they are right about what your book needs. Listen to them carefully, yes—they are professionals—but also look at what they are saying through the lens of what this book is in your eyes, and see what your instincts say about it.

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Overall, you do know what you’re doing, even if it doesn’t feel that way while writing a novel, and the only way through it is to take it on faith that things will come together in the end.

Placeholders are okay. Cliches are okay. Flat ideas and even bad writing at these points are okay. A novel is big, usually too big to hold entirely in our brains as writers, and it takes time to get to know everything in it. Weird digressions and ideas that go no where and dropped threads are okay.

Fiction takes multiple drafts because each draft gives us some areas where we need to explore and discover more, and this is the process, but hopefully, the things we need to figure out become less and less substantive as we go on.

Remember that everything will come together in the end. Embrace the mess. Trust in the random. Whatever you are writing is undoubtedly much better than you think it is, but it’s probably going to take more than one draft to it to a place where an agent needs to see it.

Try not to get too precious about the language in the early drafts and keep things loose until the shape and structure of the novel emerges. Be selective over who gives you feedback and how much you can pay attention to at what stage.

You are a good writer and you know a good story. Writing fiction is simply a matter of getting used to a different process, and that’s all, and this is an entirely doable task even if it feels weird and so very different from your other writing at times.

You do know what you are doing.

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Readers, how many of you are or have been professional writers of the non-creative variety? How is the process different for you? Please comment below.

And thanks again, Dave, for the kind things you’ve said about this newsletter. Readers, if you’re interested in smart, political writing (particularly, though not exclusively, about Canada) perhaps subscribe to his newsletter or podcast.

If you enjoy his newsletter and if budget allows, consider doing the paid subscription thing since David does this for a living whereas I am only doing this for attention.