A couple of years ago the Guardian hosted a debate at the Hay book festival on the theme of fiction v fact. Michael Ignatieff, Linda Grant, Clive James and Nick Broomfield discussed whether events in the real world had becomes so extraordinary that fiction could barely keep up. Someone mentioned the lament by Florida novelist Carl Hiassen that, no matter how hard he tried, neither he nor his peers could have dreamed up anything so wild as the deadlocked presidential vote of 2000, which came down to a few hanging chads and butterfly ballots in the November sunshine of Palm Beach county, Florida. More darkly, several novelists had shaken their heads at 9/11, knowing their imagined stories would pale alongside the intensity of the real events unfolding all around them.
At that Hay event, I sat in the chair studiedly neutral between the two competing camps, fact and fiction. But, in truth, I identified with one over the other: as a journalist, I belonged to the realm of documentary over fantasy. Now, though, I'm beginning to see this question from both sides. For now I too have dipped a tentative toe in the waters of fiction.
I say tentative because, for one thing, I've written the book under a pseudonym, for reasons I explained here. But also because I tend to describe The Righteous Men as a thriller, rather than anything so grand as "a novel".
Still, I've made the leap away from the realm of the strictly factual. And it is quite a jump. For the first time, when I opened up quotation marks, I did not glance down at a notebook to find the words: I had to make them up from scratch. To work out what would happen next, I could not call a source: I had to make that up too. As for the past, there was no checking up via Google and Wikipedia. That was "backstory" and I had to conjure that from nowhere too.
After years of writing up only what I knew or had seen or heard, I felt as if I was suddenly in very deep water, unable to touch the bottom. Often, I did the writing equivalent of swimming close to the side of the pool. I did a lot of reporting for the Righteous Men, visiting Crown Heights, Brooklyn where much of the action takes place, immersing myself in the ultra-religious community where my lead character, young journalist Will Monroe, finds himself once his wife has been kidnapped. I took thorough notes, so that when I came to write those scenes I could do so almost as a journalist, describing in detail what I had seen. I took the same approach to much else in the book, including the elements of religious mysticism on which the plot turns: those too were researched and triple-checked for accuracy, just as if I was writing about them for the Guardian rather than a story sprung from my own imagination.
But even when I dared swim away from the sides, without research or reporting, I realised that my training as a journalist had been a useful preparation. One colleague, who has done both, says it's no coincidence that so many journalists turn to fiction. For what do journalists do? They go out into the world, come back with a story, then try to craft a readable narrative, peopled with believable characters in imaginable locations. The aim is take the reader on a journey. Now that can be over 1,200 words in a newspaper feature or 120,000 in a novel, but the principle is pretty constant. Whether a journalist or a novelist, the aim is the same. We even use the same word for it: we want to tell stories.
