Using news techniques in fiction

Back in high school, I took a semester of journalism. The teacher focused hard on the “5 W’s and an H”—Who, What, When, Where, Why and How—and also on the structure of a news story (most important stuff in the first paragraph, steady increase in interesting-but-less-important details with each paragraph, so that if the editor had to trim a story in order to make everything fit on the page layout, they could just cut the last column inch without having to go through and make sure the story hadn’t lost anything). The teacher also emphasized, repeatedly, that both these things were for news articles, and should never, ever be applied to fiction.

(I have seen many fiction writers who want to include a “news story” in their fiction get this wrong—they structure their fake news story the same way they would structure their fiction, with the important revelation at the end of the story. As a result, their “news story” doesn’t sound like a newspaper article, which decreases its effectiveness.)

My journalism teacher was partly right, in the sense that at least 98% of the time, a fiction writer doesn’t want to give away the key story details in the first paragraph. One also seldom, if ever, wants to write a story that the reader can put down at the end of any paragraph without regret (and without any urge to pick the story up again).

The difference is in what the writer is ultimately trying to do. The point of a news story is to convey information to the reader as clearly, quickly, and accurately as possible. The point of a piece of fiction is to involve, absorb, and entertain the reader for as long as the story lasts.

A news story might begin “On March 25, 2019, in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, after a brief altercation between the hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee and the Stoor-hobbit Gollum, the One Ring fell into the Cracks of Doom. The destruction of the Ring caused the downfall of the Dark Lord Sauron and enabled Aragorn and his armies to defeat Sauron’s armies at the Battle of the Black Gate.” A reader would then expect the rest of the news article to go into more detail about the importance of the ring, its destruction, the battle, and everything leading up to the events in that first paragraph, but how much farther they read in the story would depend on how much they cared about the details. If all they want to know is the important stuff, well, there’s the end of the story right there. No need to spend time on the details.

Most of the time, a fiction writer would not begin a three-volume novel that way…but if they did, most readers would expect the novel to be about what comes next—how the destruction of the One Ring, the Dark Lord, and the armies affects the world and the impact the effects have on some characters the readers have yet to meet.

In other words, given the same opening, the news story looks backwards at what happened—the details of how and why, who else was involved, when and where various important milestones happened, and so on. The novel looks forwards to what will happen next.

The thing is, these points apply to the finished product, not to how the writer gets there. Developing story notes as a news story can be really useful: one starts with a paragraph giving the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How of the outcome, then backs into greater and greater levels of detail around What Happened Before That Led To That.

Note that I said “story notes,” not “plot summary.” “Who, What, When, Where, Why and How” can be applied to almost any aspect of a story, depending on the mental filter the writer wants to look at them through. So can the nonfiction article structure; all that has to change is what the writer chooses to focus on as the “most important details.”

Different types of non-fiction have different structures, which can help keep note-taking on track. If one wants a character-development-centered story summary or a theme-centered story summary, it often works best to think of the notes as a psychological case study, or as an academic/scientific paper on the subject that follows the same “abstract first giving the key points and conclusion; then the data” structure.

Writing up one’s notes as a news story, a research/academic paper, or an encyclopedia article can keep the writer focused on the aspect of the story they want or need to develop. It’s perilously easy to sit down to work out a character-development arc and get side-tracked into deciding who stole the character’s diamonds and how to catch them, or distracted by making up 500 years of imaginary history for the country the character grew up in. Laying out the character-development arc as a case study by the character’s therapist forces the diamond theft and the country’s history into the background. They appear, but only as they are relevant to the effect they have on the character’s development.

If the writer wants to work on the diamond theft instead of character development, writing the newspaper-story version keeps the character development and history lower-key; if it’s the country’s history that needs expanding, the encyclopedia article is often the most useful choice; and so on.