3 Keys to Making the Jump to Writing Fiction
If your writing life has been steeped in essays or reporting, fiction may feel intimidating. Here's how to get started, using the skills you already have.
This month at Narratively Academy, Rafael Frumkin is teaching a new seminar, Making the Jump from Nonfiction to Fiction. For today’s StoryCraft piece, Rafael offers some insight and encouragements for essayists and journalists who’ve been thinking about taking that leap.
I love to write in a lot of different prose-forms: novels, essays, short stories, hybrid journalism, and — very recently — screenplays. If you think that’s a lot of hats to wear, then you should meet some of my writer friends whose hats are so wildly disparate it just about floors me: poet-screenwriters, journalist-collagists, physicist-dramaturges, ceramicist-novelists.
We’re inclined to raise our eyebrows at these multi-hyphenates because we live in a world that tells us not just to specialize, but to specialize within our specializations. This makes it all the easier to lose sight of the forest for the trees, fooling yourself into thinking that you know how to write nonfiction but not how to write fiction. You may adhere to this belief and avoid attempting so much as a single short story of your own, despite the fact that the essays or journalism you write are also prose, and that they share more than a few building blocks in common with the form of prose fiction.
Below, I’ll share three essential building blocks that great essays and short stories have in common.
1. Characters
Believe it or not, the process of rendering characters on the page doesn’t change that much from nonfiction to fiction, even if the characters are drawn from reality in one and cut from the cloth of the imagination in the other. Whether you’re writing about your great-aunt’s battle with an abusive landlord or a group of aliens forming a girl band, you’re going to employ the same set of techniques that make these characters jump off the page. Sensory detail (How does your great-aunt’s laugh sound? Is it a squeak? A squawk?); dialogue (How do the aliens speak to each other? What do they reveal, and what stays subtextual?); and interiority (What are your great-aunt’s hopes and desires? What are the aliens’? How legible is any of this to the reader?)
Think of how Truman Capote describes the murderers and their victims in In Cold Blood. He and Harper Lee compiled thousands of pages of notes as a result of interviews and research conducted in Holcomb, Kansas. Now take a look at Capote’s short stories — you’ll see how he’s applying that same researcher’s eye for fine-grained detail to rendering his fictional characters.
2. Setting
Setting is a crucial element of both fiction and nonfiction. Think about it: there’s no White Album without California, and there’s no East of Eden, either. If you’re a journalist, you know exactly how crucial it is to acclimate yourself to a geographic place while researching a story that unfolded there: You’ve got to get to know the rhythms of the place, understand the people there, and approach your research with both respect and robust intellectual curiosity. The same goes for fiction writers — even if you’re just visiting that place in your mind, you must understand it with the same rigor, explore it in such a way that no curious reader can find a stone unturned (and thus a potential loophole still open).
Reportage and imagination have a canny relationship in that the first always informs the second. How else can you conjure that California of 3035 without first knowing the California of 2025? How can you write a murder mystery that takes place at a summer camp reminiscent of your childhood summer camp without first conjuring your every single memory of that place, and maybe even revisiting it?
3. Scene
Name a gripping work of nonfiction, and I’ll show you a great scene. There’s Taffy Brodesser-Akner getting stoned on the convention floor with her mom at HempCon. Or Tom Wolfe chatting up the Merry Pranksters in their colorful school bus. Or Maddy Crowell visiting the home of a poisoned veteran and QAnoner.
None of these scenes would be out of place in a novel or short story — the only difference is they actually happened. In all three cases, the writers draw us in with wry observations, sensory detail, and choice dialogue — especially the kind that hints at more dramatic subtext. They edit their scenes for narrative cohesion and parsimony, and use their placement in the larger piece to deliver exposition, draw the reader into the action, or deliver a final dramatic blow.
Once again, the only craft-based difference between the fictional and the reported is the story’s stated relationship to reality.
Ready to make the jump?
On Tuesday, November 18, Rafael will be teaching a 3-hour seminar on Making the Jump from Nonfiction to Fiction. Registration is open now and is limited to 15 students.
Another thing we'll talk about in class: how both fiction and nonfiction share similar DNA when it comes to concision and revision!