Bylines and Big Edits: How a Career in Journalism Taught Elizabeth Harris the Techniques of Fiction

The first reporting job I ever had was at The New York Times.

After spending four years there as a clerk—a job that entailed fact checking, answering phones and eavesdropping on the more experienced journalists around me—the Times gave me a shot and put me in a program for reporter trainees. It was an incredible place to start out, surrounded by some of the best journalists in the world.

It was also terrifying. When I made rookie mistakes, readers and sources always noticed.

The first time I wrote a meaningful article about politics, the subject was one of the country’s more recognizable politicians. In those days, most New York Times stories used to populate on the website around 9 p.m. for the following day’s paper, and the night my politics story published, I had about twenty minutes to bask in my journalistic glory—before a senior member of the politician’s staff called to scream at me about what they disliked in my copy.

I assumed I’d done something terrible, that I might be fired.

Nope. No one had told me this was just part of the job. As a reporter, your work will sometimes make people angry. And a negative article in the Times can make politicians very angry.

When I was coming up fifteen years ago, most reporter trainees moved around the Times from desk to desk. I learned to write features in the Real Estate department, I covered politics for Metro, and I did a stint on breaking news, which was then like boot camp for young reporters. I worked nights four days a week and during the day on Saturday; my days off were Monday and Tuesday.

The schedule made for a lonely ten months, but it transformed me as a writer. I wrote at least one or two stories on most shifts, about earthquakes, protests, car accidents, and power outages. And I got fast. On the night Osama bin Laden was killed, I happened to be working, and I wrote a story for the front page in forty minutes, taking feeds from around the country.

A highway between my mind and my hands had been unlocked.

Tacked up in my cubicle during those ten months was a memo written by one of the great breaking news reporters in the history of The New York Times. The memo began with the words: “Vacuum. Digest.” Reporters, it said, should vacuum up every detail in the room.

If there was a fire, what, precisely, did the fire smell like? Was it like a campfire or burning rubber?  Once the flames were extinguished, did you hear water dripping from the drenched wreckage?  Did people have soot on their faces?  What were they saying to each other? Then the reporter was to digest all those details, build a coherent scene, and help readers understand what it all meant.

I’ve been a reporter for a long time now and have written about 1,400 articles for the Times. But when I sat down to write a novel three years ago, I had no clue what I was doing.

It was the winter of 2021. I was still working mostly remotely because of Covid restrictions. My kids were back at school, and my wife, who is a doctor, had never stopped going to work. I looked around my apartment one day and realized that I was by myself, and that I had neither a commute nor a lot of distractions.

I decided to take the time I would normally spend on the subway and see if I could do something with it. I’d always wanted to write a novel, and this was my chance.

I also had an idea: I wanted to write a book about marriage and ambition and what happens when who we are in the world doesn’t match how we see ourselves. I had four characters in mind. A woman who’d become a stay-at-home-mom my accident. Another woman whose career is her entire life. And two men who are married, one is a Democrat, one is a Republican—and as the novel begins, the Republican decides to run for office.

There are several couples in my extended family who don’t agree with each other politically, and what had been an annoyance that flared around election season had become much more stressful for them to navigate. But they’re all still married, and I wondered how they did it.

That novel, How to Sleep at Night, is finally coming out into the world this week.

Journalism was the best possible training for me to become a novelist, but there were a few reporter’s habits I had to shake off to write this book.

The first was a deeply unhelpful impulse to give everything away right at the beginning, which is how news articles are structured—you tell readers the news usually in the first two or three paragraphs. This strategy does not translate terribly well to fiction.

Let’s say I was writing a book about a horse, and in chapter 9, the horse suddenly turned into a unicorn. On a first draft, my initial impulse would have been to start chapter 9 with: And then the horse suddenly turned into a unicorn! That would have sucked all the suspense out of my horse novel. Luckily, I usually recognized the impulse quickly enough to squash it. (My book includes no horses, only a pet snake named Fang and a leopard gecko called Pumpkin.)

Mostly, however, the lessons of journalism were my foundation. Take quotes, for example. In an article, a good quote can land a strong punch. It can get the reader to pay attention and give the story more emotional weight. Reporters spend a lot of time listening for those little fireworks. Turns out, paying that much attention to spoken language gives you a reasonably good ear for dialogue.

Another lesson that’s been drilled into me over the years was to keep my writing tight. If a word—or a sentence or a scene–is extraneous, get rid of it. Towards the end of the editing process on How to Sleep at Night, the manuscript had gotten too long, so with my editor’s blessing, I cut nearly twenty thousand words.

This was not just an exercise in killing my darlings. It was a mass-slaughter event. But it made the book a lot better.

These journalistic tools have been invaluable to me, but perhaps the most fundamental reporting skill that helped make How to Sleep at Night a reality was the ability to just sit down and write it.

In a news story, the first few paragraphs are called the “top.” When I first started How to Sleep at Night, I told myself that I would write the top of a book, just the top, and I wouldn’t worry about where it was going. I decided to approach novel writing the way I approach articles, by spitting out a draft and making it pretty later.

It’s easier to improve something once it exists. I was just going to pump out the top.

The file was called “Book Top” until I sold it.

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How to Sleep at Night by Elizabeth Harris is available via William Morrow.