So I'm finally pursuing my lifelong dream of writing science fiction. I pretty arrogantly and naively thought that given nearly 20 years of experience as a science journalist, writing science fiction might come easily to me. Couldn't have been more wrong.
So how is writing science fiction different from writing science journalism? Well, first and most obviously, in science fiction, you have to make things up. Since I have years and years of experience in a job that emphatically stressed that I not make things up, I do think that was a key mental block for me. I felt like I had to research everything I could to make sure everything except the actual fiction didn't ring false. It still often feels like squeezing blood out of a stone trying to complete a story. (Researching has its place, but writers often fall back on researching when they should instead be writing.)
Imagining a world is fine for me. I suspect that's true for most aspiring sci-fi authors — worldbuilding is the easiest and often the most fun part. But there's so much more to completing a publishable sci-fi story than worldbuilding. I think that's what brings down a lot of would-be sci-fi authors.
I do think my years of journalism experience are finally beginning to help me out. It took relearning some key techniques. To put it in a way that many veteran journalists will understand, a lot of my adjustments to my writing style have to do with craft, not art.
Most of journalism is craft, not art. There is of course art involved in things such as writing beautiful prose, but a lot of what sets expert journalists apart from beginners is knowing how to use the rules to your advantage, and knowing the rules well enough to exploit the loopholes or when to break the rules altogether.
I'm finding that much of writing fiction is craft, not art. I find this reassuring, since it suggests that with enough experience, I can hopefully learn craft that will help free up my art.
x) Questions.
At the heart of journalism are questions. When you get an assignment, you know the story you eventually write has to answer a number of key questions — all the varieties of who, what, where, when, why and how. You go out and try to get those questions answered as best as you can, and to also answer any more questions that pop up during the course of your reporting.
Creative non-fiction isn't all that different from regular journalism. Often you add the number of questions you ask to create an immersive experience — for example, "What was a person thinking or feeling?" or "What kind of sensory and other details can I provide to create a deep portrait of a character, place, time or so forth?"
To write publishable science fiction, I basically have to ask and answer questions I usually don't in journalism. For instance, I'm finding writing dialogue pretty difficult because I almost never put dialogue in news stories, and I wouldn't be allowed to modify or invent dialogue even if a news story did call for or permit dialogue, so that part of my writing brain is under-developed or atrophied. I have to learn how to ask questions such as "How can I make this dialogue not sound stilted?" or "What can I replace that adverb with?"
If you want me to write explanatory text, I can do that all the live-long day, since that's what I do for my job. But fiction usually asks authors to show, not tell, so I have to ask myself different questions in order to write in a way that shows, not tells.
Devising characters is currently turning out easier than I thought, since I did take some courses back in journalism school on immersive journalism. You ask characters all kinds of biographical questions and rely on the most interesting answers. What I currently find challenging is devising ensembles of characters that have interesting interactions. I'm used to acting as a biographer as a journalist, but not arranging them in ways that can drive a story forward, since I can't really do that as a journalist. (At best, I can try and find interesting ensembles of characters as a journalist, but that's not usually the kind of journalism I write.)
x) Structure.
When it comes to writing news, after you've answered as many of your questions as you can, you figure out what information you do and don’t need to present, you structure the order in which these answers appear, and you tailor the words, sentence length and other features of these replies that are most appropriate for your readership.
The veteran journalist will know that learning how to properly structure a story will save them a great deal of effort. Basic structures include the Inverted Pyramid, the Martini Glass, the Kabob typical of Wall Street Journal features, and so on.
With creative non-fiction, writers play around with the structures of stories a little bit more. But when it comes to the wide world of fiction, there are a huge amount of structures available, especially if you consider the kinds of experimental structures often seen in literary fiction.
Obviously I'm familiar as a reader with all kinds of structures in fiction, such as the three-act structure, the hero's journey, and so forth. What's tricky with using any structure in writing is to not seem formulaic. Journalism is much more forgiving in this regard than fiction — no one really cares if you're formulaic in journalism, but it can be a real problem in fiction.
I'm growing to understand some of the structures used in the dialogue of some of my favorite fiction. Aaron Sorkin definitely has some formulas in his dialogue for "The West Wing" that are effective but tiresome after a while. I liked some of the dialogue in Satoshi Kon's "Paprika” and in William Goldman's "The Princess Bride." I'm thinking of really inspecting conversations in classic comedies such as Marx Brothers movies.
The structure I'm finding most comfortable right now is mystery. Maybe that's due to years of reading and watching mysteries — Sherlock Holmes mysteries were probably my first love before science fiction — or maybe it's due to a few years I spent as a crime journalist. The mystery genre has a host of structures with which one can tell intriguing stories, and I'm finding it helpful to use aspects of those structures in stories that one wouldn't at first glance think of as mysteries.
In the latest short story I've written, tentatively titled "That Idiot Show," I use a three-act structure, but I varied it a bit to keep it interesting for myself. The first act introduces the protagonist, the second the deuteragonist, and the third is essentially a dialogue where they have equal footing. The act breaks are basically variations on a theme as well — "Get me out of here," "Get me out of here even if it kills me," and "Should I get her out of here?" A simple structure, but one I think works for this story.
In terms of getting a hang of the basics of structure and other aspects of craft in fiction, the books I've found most helpful are Hallie Ephron and Sara Paretsky's "Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel" and Writer's Digest's "Crafting Novels & Short Stories." They've really helped me look at fiction writing in a no-nonsense kind of way.
x) Drama.
A key problem in switching from the kind of science journalism I'm used to writing to science fiction is drama. Readers of the kind of science journalism I'm used to writing are used to the payoff simply being "That's new!" or "That's weird!" Although science journalism has kept me abreast of a lot of the latest discoveries in science, most of those discoveries do not in and of themselves suggest the kinds of conflict or characters that I would personally want to write about in a sci-fi story. A cool idea is not enough for a story.
Ira Glass has mentioned that the core of many stories on "This American Life" is that someone did something wrong. That's what makes for an interesting story — a character and a conflict — as any playwright or screenwriter will tell you.
Personally, I mostly hate "ripped from the headlines" fiction. When it comes to science fiction, I want to write more fanciful characters and conflicts. As I mentioned before, I'm still struggling with ways to invent good characters and conflict, and to create ensembles of conflicting characters. Hopefully I'll get better over time.
