Walking the line between fiction and journalism

Over the weekend Denise Hamilton (whose latest novel, SAVAGE GARDEN, continues a series undergoing steady improvement with each installment) wrote about journalism scandals and how she, as a former journalist herself, grapples with her fascination with them:

Most of my books are inspired by stories I covered, tales so wild and

surreal that they read like fiction. But here’s the truth about crime

novels: Even if you wanted to steal a plot from the headlines, you’d

have to add more story lines and characters and red herrings, and play

with time and space, and pretty soon the real story you started with

would morph into something completely different.

Still, after

15 years in journalism, the idea that I can make things up remains a

revelation. As I sit in my walk-in closet office, I’ll try to remember

exactly how a South Vietnamese immigrant in El Monte phrased his

terrifying tale about fleeing in a leaky boat. Then the exquisite

realization hits: I don’t have to flip through my 1993 notebook. I can

make it even more poignant.

I need to do this to write good

fiction. Reporters need to steer absolutely clear of it to write good

journalism. Some years ago, when I was toggling between fiction and

journalism, people would ask me if the lines ever blurred. No, I’d

respond, but there is overlap. The best journalists listen with a

novelist’s ear, describe scenes and people with a novelist’s eye and

convey the universal in an individual story.

The pitfalls

intrigue me, however, because I’ve stood at the edge of that abyss. I

turned to fiction so I’d have a legitimate outlet for all my imaginary

characters, dialogue and ideas.

What I also find interesting about the recent spate of known journo scandals (who knows how many we don’t know about yet?) is how pressure-driven so many of them seem to be. The pressure to succeed, to build on each success an achieve more milestones seem to bring down reporters in a way that doesn’t happen in other professions in quite the same, spectacular manner. But delving into a fictional realm and creating one’s own world seems a good way to relieve such pressures, if it’s possible. Before new pressures start up again.