Tired of Telling Just One Kind of Truth: On Moving from Journalism to Fiction

I gave up journalism and started writing novels because I was tired of telling the truth.

….This is a punchline I’ve used over the years whenever I’m asked about my career transition from being a reporter to writing fiction, and it almost always gets a laugh. It’s not quite accurate—there were many, many reasons why I switched from journalism to fiction—but there is certainly a painful honesty about this statement that reflects my failings as a reporter.

I started my career in journalism in San Francisco in 1995, graduating from college into a job market that was universally regarded as dismal (see: Douglas Coupland, Generation X) and an industry that was even more beleaguered than most. The one trick that I had up my sleeve, however, was the fact that I knew how to write HTML.

This was a skill that very few people had at the time—less than sixteen million people were even online back then—but I’d taken a course on hypertext in college and built a Web site on my own, and so when I stumbled across a job listing for Wired Magazine’s new digital venture, HotWired, I found myself miraculously qualified.

Which is how, at age twenty-two, I found myself in the curious position of helping define the entire new medium of digital journalism. The dot com industry was just starting up, and San Francisco was vibrating with impending change, and Wired was launching the very first online magazine and news service.

Never mind that most of us were twenty-somethings who hadn’t even gone to journalism school; never mind that our qualifications (or mine, at least) consisted mostly of enthusiasm and a passion for all things Internet. All that mattered was that this was the wild wild west of journalism, and we felt like we could do whatever we wanted.

Despite the fact that technology had never previously been a subject that I’d felt was my expertise, I was suddenly a very online person who thought I understood exactly how the Internet was changing culture as we knew it. I spent three years at Wired as a technology journalist, before moving on to Salon.com to do more of the same.

As such, I became a semi-regular commentator on NPR and CNN, the twenty-something they called in to explain how this whole newfangled MP3 thing worked, or what exactly an “online gaming community” was. I was a big fan of the Internet (as were most of us who worked in that industry), convinced that technology was about to change all of our lives for the better, and I would happily proselytize to anyone who would listen, including in my opinion columns about the subject.

And yet, even as I was producing story after story about the Internet—five, six, seven a week—I lived with a constant sense that I was something missing critical. I was so close to my subject—literally living it, from the minute I went online every morning—that I felt like couldn’t ever quite zoom out and see the entire picture. It was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle one tiny piece at a time, without ever knowing what the finished image was supposed to be.

And then, there were the mistakes. A journalist is supposed to be totally objective, walking into any story without any preconceived notions, but that almost never happens. My biases and expectations bled into everything I wrote, and it led to errors and elisions—and, my audience also being very online, I heard about every single one.

I will always remember the panic attack I had when I summarized the point of view of a high profile figure, and that person then emailed me personally to inform me that my take on him was completely wrong. I infuriated a massive swath of Salon’s readership with a poorly conceived hot take on the death of Aaliyah. When readers expect you to report an absolute, perfect truth, anything less feels like a total failure.

I started thinking that I wasn’t really cut out for this job I’d miraculously fallen into.

Meanwhile, I’d started writing short stories on the side. Fiction had always been my first love and my career end goal, and so as the stress of journalism began to wear on me I increasingly turned to writing workshops where the “truth” wasn’t something you had to worry about. I could write whatever the hell I wanted, without worrying about the consequences of making a mistake.

After all, how many times had I been reporting an article and felt myself frustrated by the fact that the subjects of my piece hadn’t said or done the things that would make the story truly interesting? I’d find myself imagining the perfect quote, the bit of dialogue that would really get to the heart of an issue, the action that I’d wished my subjects had taken.

This, I suspect, is what Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass probably felt, and what compelled them to confabulate: The stories they imagined were just so much better than the ones that really took place.

Fiction, I began to understand, was freedom. Where journalism was supposed to be objective, you’d never get in trouble by writing a completely subjective novel.

Eventually, I decided to take the leap: I quit my journalism job to write fiction, freelancing part-time for outlets like the New York Times to pay the bills until I finally sold a novel and was able to make stuff up full time.

But an interesting thing happened as I got further and further into my career as a novelist. The stories I wrote now may not have been based in fact—I invented not just people and scenarios but entire places and alternate histories—but in many ways they were more honest than anything I’d ever written as a journalist. Without having to worry about perfectly transcribing a quote, I could put lines into my characters mouth that I felt really captured a feeling, or a way of life, or a social movement.

It took me over twenty years to come back to the subject I’d started with as a journalist: The dawn of the Internet age and the ascendance of digital culture. The distance of time had given me a new perspective—allowed me to “zoom out” on that puzzle and see the whole image—and I felt like I was finally ready to tackle the subject that had been so thorny for me in the moment.

I began to conceive a novel that was set in the mid 1990’s, in the dot com world that had been so formative for me, as a way to mine the same material I’d written about as a journalist—but using the verity of fiction as opposed to fact.

What Kind of Paradise was my way of reckoning with the Internet boosterism of that era and the fallout of all of our blind optimism. The ensuing decades have brought us a lot of amazing advances, but also so many downsides of technology that it’s sometimes hard not to wish the genie back in the bottle.

There have been thousands of articles, essays, entire nonfiction books analyzing all this, of course; but I found that writing a novel about the subject—especially one set in the 90s—allowed me a path into the subject that was more about an emotional reckoning than factual reporting. It allowed me to dig through all of my mixed feelings about technology, distill them into my characters, and set up scenarios and conversations that could explore ambivalence and doubt rather than needing absolute historical accuracy.

So going back to that punchline, perhaps what I should have said is that not that I started writing novels because I was tired of telling the truth, but that I realized that I could better get at the truth through the flexibility of fiction. There’s more than one kind of truth, it turns out: Journalism may be about factual truth, but fiction gets at inner truth.

And both, in this age, are equally important.

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What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown is available via Random House.