Our first guest blogger here at Tez Says is A.J. Menden, author of…well, its current working title is Phenomenal Girl Five, but that is subject to change. It’ll be published by Shomi, an imprint of Dorchester in mid-to-late 2008. She also works for a magazine and newspaper, so today we’ll be learning about journalism.
Are all journalists failed fiction writers and people trying to break into the fiction industry? No.
The thing to remember is that journalism and fiction-writing are two very separate entities. They have their own style and even differing rules in punctuation, what I call real world and newspaper world. It is sometimes hard to come home and switch one section of my brain off and do the exact opposite. Newspaper world, and back when I was on desk I really wanted to drive this point home, is about telling the important stuff first. You’re not saving this titbit for later, or the sick brother to come popping up in the last act, you get the bare bones facts out front and centre. This is so if the editors or copyeditors have to cut something for space, they can cut from the end and not lose an important fact. It is about telling a basic story in as few words as possible in the most interesting way. And when you’re talking about council meetings, that can be difficult, but I’ve worked with some great writers who could make anything boring sound interesting. And the other important part of journalism is you have to write quickly. Our writers are supposed to churn out at least two stories a day and they are usually working on more than that.
Are there journalists who really want to be fiction writers? Sure, just like there are doctors, lawyers and hairdressers that also go home from their regular jobs and write about werewolves and superheroes. But they’re such different animals; I don’t think that every person that got into journalism did so because they really wanted to write books.
I was attracted to journalism because I always wanted to be a writer. A job where you get paid to write? Cool! But then I got to college, and discovered I hated it, mostly because it involved interviewing and talking to people, sometimes about things they didn’t want to talk about. Tez asked how I dealt with interviewing feckwits: well, I didn’t like doing it in college, so I switched over to page layout, something that interested me in high school. I did that for about nine years, while doing my fiction writing at home after work. It wasn’t until my newspaper decided they wanted more entertainment columnists that I started writing for the newspaper, and then only book reviews. (No interviewing, yay!) And it reacquainted my editors with the fact that I could write, which is how I ended up getting the small magazine editor job. Now I have done interviews for that job, but I think the title helps 
Speaking of editors, who edits the editors? This is probably going to differ, paper-to-paper a bit, but we have a city editor and the executive editor, who reads the copy, then the managing editor looks it over once it’s all designed on the page (formerly by moi and a team of others) and the copyeditors (formerly moi) also read it. Since I’m an editor now, I read all the copy that comes in for the magazine and then the executive editor reads it too.
I couldn’t tell you about senior columnists and the like, because we don’t have one, we’re relatively small. And I so far haven’t seen any trouble about cutting back on the columnists, specifically book reviews, because it seems like it’s something that’s of interest in my small community.
So, I hope this has all been interesting to you all.
Relevant Links
A.J. Menden (LiveJournal)
A.J. Menden (MySpace)
P.S. in unrelated news, Samhain Publishing is calling for submissions for their North American autumn (Sep/Oct/Nov) “Ménage and More” anthology. Details here.
Posted in A. J. Menden, Guest Bloggers
