Lu-Hai Liang

Some writers, wanting to write, get into journalism. They like writing, and journalism offers them a place to do it. Think of Hemingway who started out as a cub reporter on The Kansas City Star, or Malcolm Gladwell who spent ten years as a reporter for The Washington Post before going on to create exploratory narratives for The New Yorker.

There are writers like Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) and Jennifer Egan (A Visit From The Goon Squad)  who are both novelists and accomplished magazine journalists. One of my favourite writers, John Jeremiah Sullivan, plies his trade in this journo-literary tradition.

Then there are journalists who love the reporting. They like digging out facts and unearthing truth, the power to tell hidden stories, and exposing wrongdoing and injustice. These are bloodhound reporters, ambitious, and sometimes noble; the world-changing pen-warrior. Examples include John Pilger, Robert Fisk, and in broadcasting, Orla Guerin of the BBC.

Thirdly, there are journalists whose passion lie not in journalism at all or even writing, but who are just very smart, very organised and very competent. I’ve known a fair number in Beijing who fall into this camp. I won’t name them but imagine Oxbridge and Harvard graduates, or cosmopolitan bi-lingual Chinese, who fill the echelons of Reuters, the FT, the WSJ, and you might get the idea. Some of this camp just happened to drift into journalism, blown by circumstance, and who had the right skills to fulfill their accidental fate. They can write and report to a very high standard but don’t necessarily regard it as a vocation.

If I were to put myself into these three rough categories I would say the first group is the one with whom I identify the most, even if I may not share their talent.

I studied journalism at degree level because I had some interest in writing. Later on, I did more writing, and journalism was the arena in which I practiced it.

These days I’ve broadened out so that I do more writing that’s not just journalism.

For example, lately I’ve been working in an ad agency writing a story and script for a promotional campaign for a German automaker. It’s fun, highly creative, and quite well paid.

I still do journalism, freelance, but mostly I confine my writing focus to working on a novel. Writing fiction has taught me a lot about story, narrative, and much else; far more than journalism does, but I’m still glad that journalism gave me some rigour and practice. But I’m also glad that I jumped out before the sentence structures of journalism became completely ossified and entrenched.

Writing a novel is no route to riches and is a difficult road without any guarantees. But I’ve definitely enjoyed learning the craft along the way. Copywriting is a fascinating process too and a neat addition; something that is complementary to the life of a professional writer.