In a post on Lit Hub, Tracey Lien says that her career in journalism helped her learn the skills she needed to write fiction.
It wasn’t easy. Lien was trained to avoid fabrication, so she frequently questioned whether her characters and situations were believable. “For months I wrote while looking over my shoulder, as though the Fact Police were going to tackle me to the ground for daring to do make things up,” she says. However, she soon realized her bedrock journalism skills were a help, not a hindrance.
- Discipline. “As a reporter, if I wrote only when I felt inspired, I probably would have gotten fired early on,” Lien notes. “Discipline, I learned, is more reliable than inspiration.”
- The Hook. Publishing daily meant keeping an eye on how many people read which articles. “I learned the hard way that it wasn’t enough that I thought a story was interesting—I had to make it interesting for readers, too,” Lien says. “This meant hooking a reader with a compelling lead, prioritizing what was newsworthy, and keeping them engaged with rewards, whether it was a narrative too good to put down, a character rendering too colorful to look away from, or information too important to ignore.”
- Dialogue. “As I crafted character dialogue, I scrutinized each line, asking whether a character needed to speak and, if so, what was accomplished through their speech,” Lien writes. “If a snippet of dialogue wasn’t pulling its weight, it went the way of many of my news articles (cut, cut, cut!).”
- Research. “Conducting research may seem counterintuitive for a person trying their hardest to get away from the facts, but research ended up being the thing that unlocked my imagination,” Lien says. “I had to know the facts before I could stray from the facts.”
- The Pitch. As a journalist, Lien’s articles had to be pitched and approved before she got the approval to write them. “If I wanted to tell a story, I had to be able to distill it into an elevator pitch with a clear “nutgraf” (I.e. that sentence early in an article that explains to the reader the broader implications of a situation),” she explains. “This skill was useful when I was writing my novel because it helped me stay on track—I always knew what I wanted my story to be about.”
