How to Just Tell the Truth: Lessons From Journalism That Any Writer Can Use

A good journalist tells the truth plainly, succinctly, and at the perfect moment — here’s how any writer can benefit from those skills

During my time as a news producer in college, I had a lot of things running through my mind, and a lot of things to learn.

Particularly during the onset of COVID, our stories had great potential to impact people’s decision making. That carries some heavy ethical weight, and taught me just how hard it can be to parse out and handle ‘the truth’ for your audience.

There’s also the task of making sure a Story is technically ‘ready,’ that your sources are solid, and that the one date you referenced in paragraph eight was verified and triple-checked. Endless facts, references, hours looking for photos or hunting down emails.

Then there’s the question of timeliness and deadlines: everything’s happening at what feels like 150 miles per hour, but I learned that there’s little time to second guess, that you have to push to get the story out on time, suddenly the date’s arrived and — well…it can all be a bit much.

Still, out of all the lessons I had to learn, the most important was simply how to be a better writer.

It wasn’t easy: my ego was dashed upon the rocks and my mind was torn apart and sewn back together as my assumptions about writing — my foundational creative framework — were rearranged. Still, I’m all the better for it.

Journalism may seem like a specialized field, but the lessons I learned there stretched my writing well out of my comfort zone and molded it into something new. It may have impacted my craft more than any other writing position I’ve held, and after some time away from the newsroom, I’ve figured out a few ways to codify those lessons in my own mind — maybe, just maybe, these tips will help you in your writing just as they helped me.

But perhaps you’re unsure how tips from journalism could help you in particular. Perhaps you’re a novelist, or an aspiring poet, or a songwriter — what on earth could you learn from journalism that’d help you practice your specific style and reach your goals?

The truth is that writers of all kinds and at all skill levels can — and should, in my experience—learn by studying other writing disciplines. To put a face to that idea, consider a creator like Hemingway, who wrote some of America’s greatest fiction after he honed his style as a reporter covering high school sports, and later, the Spanish Civil War.

Rather than creating in a vacuum, he produced amazing fiction work that was informed by his other interests, studies, and experiences. I’ll wager, too, that poets can learn a thing or two from technical writing, SEO specialists can learn from fiction, and yeah, even a debut novelist, self-help writer or poet can learn a thing or two from journalism.

Without further ado, here are 3 invaluable writing skills that my time in the newsroom taught me:

Priority: how to keep the truth clear and complete above all else

First, there’s priority: the goal of presenting the most important information at the best possible time.

One of the models we used in the interest of priority is known as the ‘inverted pyramid,’ in which the most important information always came first and in full.

In this model, there is no such thing as a cliffhanger or an unresolved truth — think of it like the exact opposite of a mystery novel.

Instead, the truth comes first.

For instance, say there’s a narrative where a well-loved college professor protagonist is revealed to be a killer.

In a thriller novel, the most interesting information — the professor’s true identity and role — may come at the very end of the story. A journalist would go about it entirely differently, immediately putting their pen to paper and writing something like this:

Acclaimed Professor Arrested for Murdering Two

Police arrested Dr. Alain Dewitt of Hawthorne University on Saturday for the murder of two men from his hometown of Caldwell, Massachusetts.

See? The most important information is clear, simple, and present above all else. There is no suspense here. The headline and the intro sentence following it (or ‘lead’ as it is called) conveys the most important who, what, when, and where of our story.

In the inverted pyramid model, the rest of the info — stuff like what Dr. Dewitt taught, his history at Hawthorne, the evidence against him, his relationship to those two men — comes later. And now, even with these first two sentences alone, anyone who’s heard the hullabaloo at Hawthorne University doesn’t have to depend on the he-said, she-said talk of who got arrested and why…they have the most important information right there.

But how does this apply to the average writer?

Practicing priority by moving things around

For nonfiction writers, you probably need to practice this skill exactly as a journalist would. Identify the major ideas of your piece and plug them into your ‘headlines.’ And if you want to be careful not to reveal all your secrets in your story’s title, you can at least learn to pick out all your story’s information and cross reference it with what readers want to hear most, helping you angle your story to your market.

Or, when it comes to revealing truth throughout the bulk of your story, maybe you can do better to identify the major who, what, when, where, and why of your narrative and rearrange those elements in the best way. Learn to label those bits of info and then sprinkle those ‘reveals’ throughout your work to keep the reader engaged. Either way, identifying and prioritizing info will be an essential piece of your writing toolkit.

For those in fiction, the application is a little less obvious. Especially in genre writing, viewing your story in a way that clarifies the truth first rather than last feels incredibly unnatural. It’s like making a bike go forward by pushing the pedals backward — or telling a joke punchline-first…

(Person 1: Orange you glad I didn’t say banana? Person 2: Wait, what? Are you talking to me? Person 1: Knock Knock. Person 2: …Somehow I wish you’d just told the joke normally, and that’s saying something considering it’s the worst knock knock joke of all time.)

While that may not sound like the best structure for your final draft, being able to view a piece that way is still an invaluable tool in understanding how your story works. Try breaking down your short story, or your poem, or your novel, whatever it may be, into its most important events or truths: the who, what, when, where, and why of the main narrative, then individual chapters or scenes. Maybe even write out a full headline for those respective portions.

Then, figure out how each of those elements is revealed over time: is the who of your novel the real mystery, revealed halfway through? Do we not find out the why of your poem until the last line? Mapping your piece this way can help you sense the rhythm of your work — a dearth of revelations in the middle of your story may show room for you to redistribute one truth or another.

And beyond all that, this prioritization exercise is also an excellent tool for querying or submitting your piece for publication; describing your work’s purpose and key points succinctly is exactly what publishers are looking for.

Simplicity: how to eliminate fluff

Beyond writing fact-first, journalism also teaches you how to write with simplicity. Most often, this lesson is learned during the editing process.

Editing in journalism is less like the assemblage-style mish-mash of creative writing and more like an emergency surgery. You have to keep the story — your patient — alive, and that’s about all you can think about. You’re not adding any aesthetic flourishes or changing character arcs or anything like that: you’re cutting exactly where you need to, removing any foreign bodies, and making sure the truth is presented intact by the end of the ordeal.

It’s difficult and bloody work. Pages and paragraphs are cut, sentences are chopped up word-by-word and rearranged, prepositions, verbs and descriptors are replaced and tested again, and again, and again…Nothing will make you an editor like time in that particular operating room.

Take a sentence from a previous draft of this article, for instance, which didn’t make the cut:

Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to try many different positions in my own writing career, and have seen firsthand how each role differs from the others in terms of its style and objectives.

And let me chop it up according to its purely factual information, as a good journalist would:

I have worked in various positions as a writer, each with its own style and objectives.

The first sentence lacks a journalistic tone because the information isn’t conveyed simply. There’s lots of fluff, and the sentence rambles on.

In this case, editing like a journalist requires hewing that rambling sentence down to its foundational ideas — that I’ve worked in various positions as a writer, and that each position had different styles and objectives — and then rewording them into a mechanically functional set of ideas.

Sure, the revised sentence omits the fact that I saw something in those positions ‘firsthand,’ but in the journalist’s eyes, that idea is unnecessary: the important stuff can be said more simply, so it must be.

Using lists and end goals to practice writing simply

One of the best exercises for simplicity’s sake, especially with longer works, is to write the mission of your writing in as few words as possible. What’s the purpose of your essay or novel? This chapter? This page? This clause? These questions could certainly be answered while practicing the previous skill of priority: writing down your end goals in a sentence, or better yet, a word, will provide an excellent framework as you edit your work and cut it down to its core elements.

For writers of any kind, the steps that come next won’t feel good in the moment. If you’re really practicing this skill, you should be cutting up your work — interrogating it, critiquing it, hewing it down — at a level that feels like it’s just a bit too much. As many writers before have said before, you’ve gotta learn to ‘kill your darlings.’

Non-fiction writers will really need to pay attention to whatever facts, research, or argumentation they’re presenting to their audience. This is especially important if you’re struggling with holding your audience’s attention or getting them to understand ‘the point.’ First, identify the key portions of your work that you feel are contributing to the problem —where there’s too much info, or too little info despite the use of so many words — and list out all the key points of information being conveyed in that section.

How many ‘whos’ are present? What actions are they taking? What arguments have you put forth? Once you have that list, compare it to the purpose of your work in general and that section in particular. Circle the items you know are essential, cross out anything superfluous, and take a whack at that section again. The use of the list here is the key—since you can’t just list out each sentence as it’s written, you have to condense each idea into something appropriate for a bullet format: that’s what helps you see what you’re really saying.

In the world of fiction, writing simply can feel even more difficult because you don’t have a set number of facts or ideas that you ‘need’ to present: you’re the creator, so how do you decide what to say and what to cut?

Just as a journalist would, take whatever portion of your work you feel is not being told simply (and hey, don’t be afraid to admit that it’s the whole darn piece sometimes) and interrogate it. List out its key features, events, characters, or themes, in as few words as possible. Compare and contrast these ideas with the overall ideas of your work —your ultimate priorities — and learn how to cut everything else out. And I mean everything.

Don’t be afraid to excise characters, eliminate chapters, shorten scenes or condense histories. It’ll feel terrible in the moment, but you’d be surprised at how quickly you’ll forget the pain. Sure, you could add things back in after the fact if you regret cutting it out, but after reading a section of your story that you’ve streamlined into something sleek, functional, and beautiful…you might not want to.

Accessibility: how to identify presumptions and write for just about everyone

Lastly, journalism requires accessible writing, so that anyone can glean the facts. At its most basic level, this means that you have to be very careful with information that’s complex or that requires industry- or area-specific knowledge.

Instead, everything you say must be understood by most or explained to all.

In that sense, this job can give you a taste of tailoring your writing to a certain market, and will give you a much better idea of how difficult it is to write for everybody.

Say I’m writing for an American paper but live in Atlanta (hail Georgia), where everyone knows what Ponce City Market is. Say a robbery occurred there, and my headline and lead start like so:

Robbery at Ponce City Market, Thousands Stolen

On Saturday night, thieves stole over $43,000 from Ponce City Market, the Atlanta City Police Department confirmed on Sunday morning.

There are many things that should be explained and clarified, but only one part of this lead remains ambiguous to the ‘average American reader.’ Saturday night is a clear enough time, “over $43,000” is a descriptive quantity of cash, and even if you don’t live in the area, the “Atlanta City Police Department” has a self-referential function and location…but what the heck is Ponce City Market? Essentially, it’s a big, trendy mall in downtown Atlanta — and it has to be explained.

Now, if I were just pointing out some random spot in order to identify the ‘where’ of the act of robbery, and nothing more, explaining what Ponce City Market refers to wouldn’t be essential. For instance, this could just be a ‘robbery that occurred at Mulberry Street,’ where Mulberry Street wouldn’t bear much significance other than as the location of the event. In that case, additional info about the area could come later on in the article (remember the inverted pyramid — less important, more granular information comes later!).

But in this case, $43,000 was stolen from that location, not just at it, and knowing more about the location may help the reader to understand the event on a fundamental level. In my first headline and lead, Ponce City Market could be a farmers’ market, or an antique store, or some sort of investment hub — but in reality, it’s a popular shopping center that sells retail goods and houses restaurants. That’s the area-specific knowledge that needs to be clear for everyone, not just Atlantans.

Try this on for size:

Robbery at Major Atlanta-Area Mall, Thousands Stolen

On Saturday night, thieves stole over $43,000 in retail goods from Ponce City Market, an Atlanta shopping center, as confirmed by the Atlanta City Police Department on Sunday morning.

I’ve changed a little for the sake of flow here and it still isn’t my best lead yet. But in this particular case, the information that was area-specific has been brought to light for a greater audience. Keep an eye on that sort of ambiguity, the presumed knowledge that can be loaded into every sentence and idea.

Getting inside your reader’s head to make your work accessible

For nonfiction writers, this could look like making an audit of sorts regarding your target audience: what exactly is it that they know? What is their average level of experience in the field you’re writing about? When you’ve decided who you’re targeting, you can be more consistent in how you reveal and explain certain levels of information. Perhaps this exercise will give you a better idea of how to put together a ‘For Beginners’ series or something, too, to get all your readers on the same page.

For fiction writers, the application is different. High fantasy writers with worldbuilding tendencies would do well to identify what they want to explain versus assume of their reader’s knowledge, chapter by chapter. Sometimes it’s fun to leave your reader in the dark on some concept in your work and let them reach their own conclusions, but this has a limit. Instead of throwing out concepts blindly, intentionally select pieces of knowledge to reveal versus conceal according to your audience: what are they prepared to read, and are you giving it to them? This exercise can also be helpful in the querying field too, as it allows you to get a better handle on your target audience and then convey that group to potential publishers.

Now, there’s plenty more that we can dive into with these exercises and the art (science?) of journalistic writing in general. I could go on about how writing needs to be ‘punchy,’ about how information needs to be verified, ethical, timely, etc., but these lessons will do for a start. They come from the discipline of journalism, but they can apply to any and all writing: no matter your goals, understanding how to write clearly, simply, and accessibly is essential.

In creative writing, you can eschew priority to make something more ambiguous, for instance, but only when you first understand how to convey that same idea clearly. You can artificially complicate an idea as well, instead of presenting it simply, but you should know how to complicate it in the right way so that readers aren’t getting lost in something convoluted. And you can write for an audience with presumed knowledge, of course, but you have to understand exactly what that knowledge is, where it is referenced in your writing, and how it could be interpreted…or misinterpreted.

It’s not that all writing has to be journalistic, but I’ll still bet my money on the writer who understands these principles over the one who doesn’t. If you’re curious where to go from here, try taking pieces from your latest story or sonnet and cutting them up with these lessons in mind. Highlight and analyze every ambiguity, convolution, complication, or presumption, and ask yourself whether or not those things are needed and perfect exactly where they are.

If there’s something you can improve, bring that piece into the operating room and start cutting it up as a good journalist would. Perhaps the truth of your work will be better off for it.

Interested in learning more tips about writing and the creative process in general? Stay updated with my ongoing series titled Fraught Experiments, an introduction to creative tools used throughout history and how you can apply them to your next project.

Automatism/Subconscious Creation: Your kid can probably do this. Can you?

Lessons From Journalism That Any Writer Can Use was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.