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The 3 Ds From Journalism That Can Help You Write Your Novel
Contributor
Written by
She Writes
July 2019
Contributor
Written by
She Writes
July 2019

This guest post was written by Megan Goldin, author of The Escape Room.

A few weeks ago an old friend who started his career in journalism with me as an intern at the Associated Press and who is now an executive producer at NBC gave me a tour of the NBC studios and newsrooms at the Rockefeller Center in New York. My heart skipped a beat, and not just because I was lucky enough to get a peak at the Saturday Night Live studio. In fact, I was more excited to walk through the newsrooms where I was hit by a wave of familiar nostalgia. Newsrooms were my home for many years when I worked for Reuters and other media outlets. There’s a camaraderie in a newsroom, an electrical buzz from the deadlines, pressures and adrenalin rush that comes with covering the news.

Being a novelist is quite different from journalism in many ways. It’s a solitary profession far from the excitement of the newsroom. There’s no cynical chatter going on in the background and no managing editor striking the proverbial whip. Writing novels is more like running a marathon than sprinting in a team relay. It has it’s own joys; bringing characters and story to life, letting my creativity run amok and that incredible feeling when I saw my thriller The Escape Room in its beautiful gold cover for the first time. 

The skills that I learned as a journalist have certainly helped me make the transition from journalist to novelist. Not only in the obvious ways such as writing, storytelling and researching skills. I would argue that the most important journalistic skills that have helped me make the transition from journalist to novelist are what I call ‘The Three Ds’. Let’s start off with the first one. 

Determination

Determination is perhaps the most important. As a journalist it often means plugging away at a story until it’s confirmed, written and most importantly published. Determination is something that journalists have in spades. Determination is what gets a writer through the long grueling emotional roller-coaster of writing a novel. It requires incredible determination to keep going until there is a first draft.

Determination is essential once the manuscript has been written because getting published, as I discovered after I wrote my novel, is exceptionally difficult. It involved sending pitches to agents, each submission of which is a writing project in-and-of itself. Different agents have different requirements. Some want ‘query’ letters that are brief and bubbly. Others want long, detailed pitches with market comparisons, summaries, excerpts or elevator pitches. Sending those query letters and dealing with the rejection that inevitably follows can shatter the confidence of even the most self-assured writer. Yet to succeed in this profession, you need to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep going just like Wile E Coyote of Looney Tunes fame.

Deadlines

Deadlines is the second ‘D’. For journalists, deadlines are holy. When I was covering breaking international news at the Reuters news agency in the Middle East, we’d often joke that our deadline was five minute ago. If you’re writing a novel set yourself a deadline for the first draft. Whether it’s six months, a year or longer, always have an end date that you are working towards. Whatever the deadline, it's important to do everything possible to meet it. It's the only way to beat the enemy of every writer: procrastination.

Discipline

The final D is discipline. Discipline is what makes you sit down in front of a blank screen each day and write even when it’s the last thing that you feel like doing. Getting into the discipline of writing despite the distractions of day-to-day life is a crucial skill for any writer of fiction or non-fiction. A writer who is disciplined and writes regularly will produce a manuscript. It might not be perfect. It might be badly flawed. But once you have a first draft then you can always go back and re-edit or rewrite things. Without a first draft, you have nothing to work with.

Writing a novel is a magic combination of imagination, storytelling and writing skills. But it takes the three 'D's to turn it into a book.

MEGAN GOLDIN worked as a correspondent for Reuters and other media outlets where she covered war, peace, international terrorism and financial meltdowns in the Middle East and Asia. She is now based in Melbourne, Australia where she raises three sons and is a foster mum to Labrador puppies learning to be guide dogs. THE ESCAPE ROOM is her debut novel.

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