Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.
Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
I think, as journalists, we sometimes are afraid to enter into the emotional lives and the complications of the lives of the people we write about - we don't really have the space and the room to deal with those things. But as a novelist, that's precisely what you're writing about.
Great journalism will always attract readers. The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism have to be brilliantly packaged; they must feed the mind and move the heart.
Journalism as theater is what TV news is.
I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.
As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.
Because I was once a reporter, I've always felt a sense of estrangement inside the newsroom. The field is alive and interactive, while the newsroom is quiet and stereotypical.
Speaking generally, people who are drawn to journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less than they are from the top down.