James Rada is an award-winning newspaper columnist and fiction novelist. I’m excited to share with all of you a recent interview I conducted with Jim, and I appreciate the time he took out of his busy schedule to talk with me.
Jim, you’re a newspaper man as well as a novelist. Which came first?
Neither. I was an advertising copywriter first. That’s the guy or gal who writes all the words in an ad. I graduated BYU with an advertising degree and worked for my first couple years in that field and enjoyed it.
Then my wife and I decided to move to the country and finding work in advertising was a bit harder. So I began freelance writing. I not only wrote ads but I took on anything that would pay including newspaper articles. During this time, I did a lot more novel writing, too.
I sold my first novel, “Logan’s Fire,” to Covenant Communications in 1996, but I had already been doing newspaper writing before then.
When my wife wanted to cut back on her work time when we adopted our first son, I needed to find steadier work than freelancing. It just happened that the local newspaper was looking for a writer so I applied and got the job.
I consider that a bit of divine intervention because writing jobs were so scarce in Allegany County, Maryland, that few people ever left the newspaper. I was there for 5 years and I was the still the reporter with the least tenure when I left.
I have found that my success in each field helps the other. My journalism awards help validate me to book publishers and the fact that I’m a novelist helps validate me to newspapers and magazines.
How does your writing style between the two mediums differ?
The biggest difference is that I’m a lot more in depth with novels. You have to be when a novel will be 75,000 – 100,000 words and the longest newspaper stories are really only 1,000 words. A number of my articles have been so rich with information and stories that my articles haven’t done them justice and I’ve used them as the nugget to create a historical novel. This happened with my books “The Rain Man” and “October Mourning.”
News writing has a lot more variety of styles. I like writing in a narrative style, but sometimes I might use other styles like the Q&A style of this interview.
I also find that the goals of the two mediums differ. My main goal when I’m writing a newspaper article is “What can I say to help the reader better understand the issue and what happened?” When I’m writing a novel I’m looking for ways to entertain the reader.
In the end, I think it probably all comes out much the same whether I’m writing novels, articles or even ads. I had an editor go to a conference once and when he came back he told the reporters some of the things he had learned. One of the items he talked about was tips for writing articles that people want to read. After the meeting, I told him, “Jan, those are the same tips I was taught in Copywriting 101 for writing ads.” And truthfully, they were the same things I’ve seen in print for writing novels and short stories, too.
How does your research differ between writing for the newspaper and writing a novel?
My research doesn’t differ all that greatly, just my sources. With newspaper writing, you interview a lot of people who are living, but you also need to do background research. With my novels, since they are primarily historical, I don’t have a lot of living people I can talk to so I’m looking more at books, newspapers and journals. My historical articles and historical novels are researched pretty much the same way.
We’ll continue our interview with James Rada tomorrow. In the meantime, be sure to visit his website to learn more about him.
Related Blogs:
Author Interview: Carole Thayne
Author Interview — Rachel Ann Nunes