By: Robb Grindstaff

I had known since pretty early in my life that I wanted to be a writer. My parents had given me the complete works of Mark Twain when I was in fourth grade, after I had devoured Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. By middle school, I was a fan of Edgar Allan Poe. As a high school freshman, The Catcher in the Rye moved me to my fourteen-year-old core. I wanted to write novels that affected readers the way JD Salinger had affected me.

As I prepared for my first year of college, where I planned to major in English, I made a fateful decision. I added journalism as a double major along with English. That, I thought at the time in a rare instance of good decision-making as a teenager, would enable me to get a day job until I wrote the Great American Novel and became rich and famous. I figured that might take a couple of years.

More than forty years later, I retired from the newspaper business.

I started as a reporter and then editor before moving to the business side, management, and eventually executive positions with media companies. But my career in the journalism world carried me and my family to places around the world, from small towns to major cities, from eight years in Washington DC to five years in Tokyo.

With a family, a mortgage, a career, paying for braces, saving for my kids’ college, and often sixty or more hours in a workweek, fiction took a back seat. I never stopped writing fiction, but it was a hobby. A short story here and there. A few attempts at novels that never got off the ground.

Then, in my forties, a character showed up in my head and wouldn’t shut up. I took dictation while she gradually revealed her story. That took a few years, but it eventually became a novel—my first book written, although it would be the second book of mine published after numerous rewrites over several years. I had to learn how to write a novel first.

Writing a novel turned out to be a bit more complex than writing a news story, an opinion column, or a 5,000-word short story. Who knew?

A number of writers and interviewers over the years have asked me how journalism prepares a writer for fiction. Many are a bit skeptical of any connection between the two. Journalism didn’t just impact my fiction writing but formed my style and voice.

What does journalism teach about writing that transfers to long-form fiction? Quite a bit, actually.

First, the basics of news writing is the standard:

• Who = characters

• What = plot (what happens)

• When/where = setting (last night in a liquor store robbery or a two hundred years ago in an English nobleman’s castle)

• How = narrative arc (how does the story unfold; how does one event lead to the next)

• Why = character arc and theme

In journalism, we’re taught to use quotes and proper attribution from the subjects and sources (the “characters”). Only use the best quotes, the important parts that tell the story in the characters’ words. In fiction, we call this dialogue. But in a news story, just as in fiction, you can’t (usually) just write quotes. You have to fill in the story in narrative form.

The advice my journalism professor repeated ad nauseam was “Write tight.” Use just enough words to say what needs to be said. Strip it down. Find the simplest, most direct way to convey the story to the reader. Don’t wander around aimlessly or try to write pretty sentences. Make your point and move on. Don’t write a 2,000-word story if you can tell it in 500 words.

There are many more connections and continuities between short-form journalism and long-form fiction, but it doesn’t fit every writer, of course. Every author has a different style. Every genre has different expectations. Longer, more complex sentences, more detailed description, deep dives into philosophical musings in narrative form—all of these appear in many works of fiction that would be edited right out of most journalism, and for good reason, but can work well in fiction.

There are also newer writers who feel compelled to write deep, complex sentences and detailed descriptions because they think that’s what writing is supposed to be. But as the famous author Elmore Leonard has said, “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.” I think my journalism professor said something similar four decades ago.

Journalism has infused my writing style. Simple, direct, natural. Dialogue as realistic as possible, and kept to the important parts, leaving out chit-chat and conversations that don’t drive the story forward. The bare necessities of description. Just enough to create an image that the reader can fill in the details in her own mind.

An exercise my literature professor gave me years ago—just a voluntary project, not a class assignment—to help see the difference between writing styles as my own voice developed was to read a dozen or so novels. Start with a book by Ernest Hemingway, then read one by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Then read another by Hemingway, then another by Fitzgerald, until I’d read them all. These were two of the greatest authors of twentieth century America. They wrote during the same time period (mostly). They were friends (mostly).

I loved Fitzgerald’s beautiful and complex prose, use of metaphors and similes, descriptive phrases that made me stop and see something routine or mundane in a different way. He used vivid imagery with delicate phrasings and precisely chosen words. I would often stop and reread a sentence just to wallow in the beauty of his prose. I’d think to myself, “This is how I want to write.”

Then I’d read a book by Hemingway. The writing style was polar opposite to Fitzgerald. Simple, direct, almost plain, terse. His description was minimal yet effective. Yet this simplest of writing styles held a depth. The characters and their emotions, their pain, would pop off the page and surround me. He was a master at realistic and spare dialogue, letting the characters speak as they really would speak, not forcing them to say words that were from the writer.

Hemingway’s advice on writing was, “A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous.”

Despite the beauty of Fitzgerald’s prose, Hemingway’s writing felt more natural and powerful to me.

It was no surprise when I learned Hemingway had been a journalist.

A few other famous writers—you’ve probably heard of them—who started their careers in journalism include names like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Joan Didion, Carl Hiaasen, Susan Sontag, Anna Quindlen, and many, many more.

Robb Grindstaff is the author of four novels of contemporary southern lit, and more than twenty published short stories. He’s been editing other fiction writers for fifteen years, including traditionally published, agented, and bestselling independent authors, and also regularly teaches fiction writing courses. Robb will be an instructor this June at the Novel-in-Progress Book Camp, held in Racine, Wisconsin (between Chicago and Milwaukee). The Novel-in-Progress Book Camp is sponsored by the Chicago Writers Association, the Wisconsin Writers Association, and HerStry LLC.