My last session (and one of the last sessions of the festival in Ubud) was about the relationship between journalism and fiction with Australian lawyer/surfer turned writer Jock Serong, Portuguese poet Anna Weidenhoizer and Indonesian journalist and writer Muhammad Subhan. Every panelist has written both fiction and non-fiction. It was brilliantly moderated by Australian journalist Rosemarie Wilsom, a big reader of both fiction and non-fiction.
I thought that, given it was late and audience felt hot and tired, there might not be enough people. To my delightful surprise, there was a sizeable crowd, though not as big as the session with Jung Chang, of course.
It went really well!
Below are some of the points I made.
Journalism and fiction cover a lot of common ground. There’s little wonder that some successful writers come from journalistic background, Mark Twin, Ernest Hemingway, Joan Didion, to name just a few.
Some journalists got into the profession because they love writing. Then some find journalism frustrating and limiting. There’s a fundamental difference between the two: one is pure imagination and the other pure documentation. In journalism, you have to stick to what has actually happened. You can’t allow your imagination go wild. That’s a major restriction for some literary minded journalists. That was why in the 60s the so-called ‘New Journalism’ was launched in US where journalists generously borrowed techniques commonly used in faction writing, setting the scenes, good conversation, sense of suspense, character development. One good example is in Cold Blood by Truman Capote.
I’d like to think that I’ve become a slightly better writer after spending years in completing the novel and I hope I can better apply the fictional techniques I’ve learnt in my future non-fiction books.
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