Much as I would have loved – would still love; I haven't given up hope – to have been primarily a published novelist, over a writing career spanning ftymumble years my main source of income from the written word seems to have been from journalism. I didn't exactly intend things to turn out that way; it was simply a matter of taking the opportunities that were presented to me, and the first of those was a magazine article, closely followed by reviewing and feature writing for the local newspaper. That lasted a long time (decades, reluctant though I am to admit I'm old enough for that, since inside I'm still in my twenties) and came to an end a couple of years ago when the paper decided it wasn't going to employ freelancers any more.
I didn't stop writing fiction. Of course I didn't; nothing was ever going to stop me asking what if...? and turning the question into stories. Quite a few of them even got published, though never a novel, alas. And I don't think it's an accident that most of the published stories happened after I started on the journalism.
I had no formal training; I kind of picked it up as I went along. It was plain from the outset that the way to gather material a news item (I did a little of that too) or a feature article was to ask questions (yeah, OK, obvious or what?), and that those questions were pretty much the same in every case: who, what, where, when and why.
And whaddya know, when I was invited to teach some courses at a local adult education centre and started to analyse the process of writing in order to have something to teach, I discovered that in order to create a piece of fiction I needed to ask exactly the same questions.
OK, I know, I know; that's pretty obvious too, when you sit down and think about it. But I didn't think about it. Until then I'd been a seat-of-the-pants writer, and it seemed to be working, so I didn't ask any questions at all; I just did it.
I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that learning the craft of writing – which I never really did, until I started trying to teach it to other people – was a little like learning to drive a car. Which, coincidentally but not irrelevantly, I had done only a few years before I started to teach those courses. When you begin, you think very carefully about what to do with your hands and feet, when to press, push, turn, slow down, speed up, and, probably most important of all, stop. And after a while you stop thinking about it, at least on a conscious level; it becomes second nature, and you find you're just doing it.
I went through that process and sequence of events when I began to drive, but somehow it had passed me by when I began to write, and I arrived at the 'just did it' part without thinking about how I got there. These days, though, I think about it a little more; I review other people's books, and actively look for the who, where, what, when and why. And that has led me to another conclusion: it's all a matter of balance. When and where are common factors, and carry much the same weight in every book. Some books focus on the who; the entire narrative is devoted to working out who did the crime. In others, it's plain from the start, and the focus is on the why. Then there's the what. I finished Lee Child's Night School not long ago, and a big question from the start was what is going on here? It didn't become obvious until very close to the end, and even after it did, another what raised its head: what was Reacher going to do about it? How was he going to save the world this time?
If I wanted to wax philosophical, I could begin to muse about the way those five little words lie at the root of pretty much everything. But I'm not a philosopher; I leave that to my daughter who is much better at it than I am and has letters after her name to prove it. Me, I'm a writer. But the questions are still the same.
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