Unless you share, along with Dr. Jekyll or Gollum, the capacity to instantaneously morph into another creature for a few hours, it is not possible to be at once a novelist and a reporter. Part of the difficulty is that both the newspaper and the novel are slave drivers who demand, even while stroking your ego and chuffing you up, that you offer your soul—something that cannot be shared like bread. You may serve one but not two masters.

Each of the masters demands off-hours devotion. If you are in the thick of a novel, you may complete your writing for the day, but the characters will never stop whispering and bantering in your head; you may of course refuse to listen, but then you risk missing out on something essential without which your characters will turn out to be mono-dimensional phonies. In the same way, the reporter can never escape the news. There is no withdrawing from the noisy world, no peace of the recluse. If a ‘big story breaks,’ you must be there with recorder and notebook to get the story down, despite the fact that you may be in one of those morbid moods where nothing short of the Apocalypse will pique your interest.

I have so far done my best to resist the infiltration of the newsroom in my out-of-office hours. I must be one of only a handful of reporters, at least in the industrialized nations, who lack a cell phone. But it turns out that I am paying doubly for my unprofessional revolt. In recent weeks I have repeatedly woken up in a jarring anxiety because I cannot figure out the angle on the urgent news story I was just dreaming about. When you begin having nightmares over lead sentences, you know that, cell phone or no cell phone, your ass is now the newspaper’s.

But like Mephistopheles, the novel and the newspaper bestow spoils in exchange for your soul, though dissimilar ones. The novel offers freedom from all worldly trappings (resumes, supervisors, outfits, social niceties) and the electric sense that you are going for It, for the Big One, the novel that the slumbering century has been roaring for, the novel that will not render senseless all the transgressions and inflictions and errors of your life, that will transport you up over all the stifling tedium of your daily rote, that will make something alive and terrible and lasting before your life has hemorrhaged away, that will turn your days into a foolhardy one-in-a-million gamble, though a gamble for what you don’t even know nor do you care since it is the mad swinging thrill of the gamble that counts.

The newspaper, meanwhile, takes a blunt paws-to-the-earth approach in the booty it offers. There are the basics: a daily readership and a salary, even if a paltry one; the combination, at least to a novelist, approaches nirvana. Then there are the accoutrements: travel and social mingling, the opportunity to act upon your indignation at the corruption of power (ie. expose crooks in high places), the opportunity to be corrupted by the many freebies offered you in hopes of good press (ie. lunches, trinkets, flights, flattery), the opportunity to avenge yourself on those who wrong you or your family (ie. front page, you bastard), the confidence boost from seeing your name in print every day, the inflated sense of self-importance that comes from knowing that you are not only close to the events of your day but also writing their history, and the airs that result from having the weight of a newspaper behind you, something that always commands you respect no matter how unwarranted it may be.

This combination of perks and demands ensures that, as with the corporate or military life, you maintain absolute loyalty to your god. The same modern pressures that have rendered the under-forty crowd into an itinerant group of job-changers have also led to a rise in ‘holistic’ and ‘integrated’ lifestyles that blend such things as Buddha and Big Business. But, facades and frivolities aside, you cannot be a monk in the morning and a tycoon in the afternoon. The meditation room and the boardroom may amicably sit side-by-side, but you cannot serve God and Mammon. It was true thousands of years ago and it remains true now.

From afar the newspaper appears to win in the Faustian bid for the writer’s soul; whereas the novel’s intangible offerings are suspiciously subjective, the no-nonsense bounty of the press realm is indisputable. For example, I am currently on a Cyprus Airways plane heading to London for a weekend frolic known as a EU press event, compliments of the European Commission. No novel of mine has ever afforded me such an opportunity. The novel may offer dignity and bouts of exultation, but when it comes to material goods it cannot, except for a lucky few, even dole out a coffee, let alone airfare, room and board.

From up close, however, the newspaper life is less glorified. Inept bores and unscrupulous devils continue to run the world in great part because the press is constantly chasing after them with microphones and making a fuss over them. It is possible of course to ask the chieftains the right questions and to place their quotes against the relevant facts so that you are not merely telegraphing propaganda. But the fact remains that journalists clustered around a high-ranking official more resemble buzzards around a piece of rotten meat than they do purveyors of truth. In fact there is no avoiding the foul scene for reporters and officials rely on each other: the reporters need the ‘authoritative sources’ and the officials need the PR platform, even if it is not great PR. For better or worse, the unhappy mycorrhizal lifeline between the two is a permanent one.

A newspaper also affords no time for loitering over words, for the sculpting and buffing that is necessary to make the pages gleam. The essential matter for every newspaper is to fill the pages. An invisible sign may as well hang over all newsrooms: ‘Poetic sorts best not apply.’ If you manage to squeeze out a pleasing turn of phrase over the course of the article, then kudos to you, but like with public toilets at chili con carne fiestas, you will upset the others if you take too long to finish your work.

In its mythic idealized form, the newspaper promotes vigorous concise prose. But economic forces push newspapers towards the sort of vulgar hyperbole where a simple rain shower is made out to be a torrential downpour, or a fleecy cloud a thunderhead. This leads to the temptation to overuse action verbs: speculation rages, controversy swirls, rows erupt, and plans are thrashed out. It is easy but dangerous to fall back on them; and like with chain-smoking or masturbation, once you start it is hard to kick the habit.

Cousins to the action verbs are the action adjectives; so we read about ailing Archbishops, beleaguered MPs, and embattled defendants. On the whole these adjectives are inoffensive and can impart some needed zest to a dull topic. But due to time pressures, the temptation also exists to bang out the articles (note the action verb) by stringing together lifeless hand-me-down phrases and clichés. There is no avoiding every wooden phrase, but you can only handle so many blows beneath the belt, opened cans of worms, and wool pulled over your eyes before you fly off the handle, hit the roof, or maybe even go into a rage, turning purple in the process, of course.

It is obvious I am only spiraling further away from what I said I would do at the outset: demonstrate why one cannot simultaneously be a reporter and a novelist. I have made a feeble case so far. In fact, looking back, I can see that I have entirely ducked the issue, and have simply tried slipping in a few dodgy contrived reasons to justify my claim, which I now wish I had retracted and edited out long ago.

But due to procrastination it is now the night of December 4th, and so I have no time to cut-and-paste this essay into a more coherent and respectable state. But something must be done with it. Since I have been steadily dropping, throughout this two-part essay, from third person neutral (the reporter cannot), to second person inclusive (you cannot), to first-person confessional (I cannot) I will stick to the confessional mode.

When I wrote “one cannot be both a novelist and a reporter at the same time” what I should have written was “I cannot.” I may as well admit that I have proven incapable of finishing or even working on a novel while holding a job as a newspaper reporter and so I have been making sweeping God-like generalizations, based on my very limited experience, about the incompatibility of reporting and novel-writing in order to shift all the blame for my fiction hiatus onto the universe. In other words, much of this has been no more than a giant excuse to make myself feel better.

But not all of it is an excuse. The rest is the result of a feeling that may come over me after a laborious day in the newsroom, as I am sitting under a swaying light on the balcony in the cool of the rising breeze with the warmth of zivania upon me, overlooking the hum of nighttime Nicosia, properly alone with myself for the first time in days; at times like that my unfinished novel can strike, rising up out of my forgotten memory to stare at me grimly, to ask if I have stepped into the world only to step out of myself, to tell me that though I have been doing nothing but writing, in the end I have written nothing.

It is a feeling that brings to mind some words from a book that I read years ago on the shores of Sinai, when my days were long and brimming and empty:

Constantine Markides

There is also the fact that every writer—or at least the anxious, competitive, insecure sort of writer, which accounts for a hefty chunk of the good ones—is continuously measuring his or her life by the lives of past writers, and any glance at the biographies of canonized writers will suggest that a ‘real’ writer should not be a virgin in either reporting or fiction. Of course this is baloney and many of the best fiction writers have never been reporters, and the same holds vice versa. But the myth nonetheless remains, and so the leapfrogging of writers between fiction and reporting goes on, only further perpetuating the illusion that there is some essential bond between the two.

From afar it appears that such an invisible umbilicus exists: both the reporter and the novelist write about human life, even if the novelist may sometimes do so in disguised form; they are both committed, at least in creed, to that academically reviled notion called truth; when not writing they often find their pleasure and distraction in drink, though rarely with the excess and tragic dissipation of the 20th century writers; they are vain, ambitious, childish creatures whose noble swellings in their writings are rarely reflected in their lives; they share with priests the feeling that they, unlike most of the world, are onto something big; they scorn authority even though in their own way they are more power-hungry than politicians; and though this is more true of novelists, they suffer poverty and low social status because they also suffer under the illusion that eventually—albeit in a post-mortem resurrection—the world will recognize them as the literary titans they think they are.

But one need only be a committed fiction writer as well as a reporter for a spell to realize that it is not the umbilicus they share, but the epidermis; the internal change required to transition from a reporter to a novelist, or vice versa, is comparable to that of a midwife taking up a new career as an executioner. They may both write, but besides that they have as much in common as do the ballet soprano and the Tuvan throat singer. The novelist turned reporter is akin to a hermit turned circuit lecturer or a holy fool turned Ombudsman.

Now traditionally, the switchover takes place from reporting to novel writing, but I happened to come at it from the other end; instead of falling through the rabbit hole into fiction, I crawled up out of Wonderland into the glaring meat-and-potatoes sunshine of ‘the real world.’ Of course the weird Cheshire cat, the rabid queen, and the strung-out timekeeping hatter are merely blunt and colorful portrayals of real life characters and Wonderland is simply our no-nonsense land observed by someone who is not sleepwalking. But even if the novelist and the reporter are ultimately dealing with the same world, their work and life could not be further apart.

To begin with, the novelist, unless commissioned, has no deadlines except self-imposed ones, which are rarely followed strictly. A novelist can struggle over a paragraph for six hours and still feel like progress was made or can whittle away a whole week squirming in front of a blank screen without losing his job. A reporter, meanwhile, on average has to research and write three stories a day—often important or complicated ones, or on unfamiliar topics—which means scanning the archives and other newspapers for background, doing any necessary fieldwork, tracking down officials behind their defensive shield of secretaries, getting all the phone calls in, keeping an ear on the radio for breaking stories and an eye on the fax machine for press releases, translating all the interviews and text if working in a foreign-language press, figuring out the ‘angle’, and then “hammering out” the stories, which may not in the end be merely a journalese action-verb phrase since a veteran reporter and a skilled carpenter can probably pound out an equal number of nails and words per hour.

The next obvious distinction is that the novelist writes in solitude, alternating between ecstasy, ennui and depression, while the reporter usually works in a large noisy newsroom without the privacy or breathing space to permit either boredom or depth of feeling; the closest a newsroom gets to silence, which is not very close, is when the daily deadline approaches. Then the chatter and banter subside and the furious typing begins. It is astonishing how much raucous five or six reporters can make on computer keyboards. The typewriter may be an extinct species in the newsroom, but the boisterous bang-it-out style remains the typing standard.

The two differences that I have so far mentioned—that novelists work alone and have the leisure time to dally, while reporters work in a beehive and must produce without pause—may be superficial, but they reach into one’s core. The novelist, while in the thick of a novel, only has one foot in the flesh-and-blood world. The rest of him is swallowed up in the story. Outwardly he is alone, but inwardly he is enmeshed in and consumed by the lives of his characters, which are not his for very long since he soon becomes theirs. Because he need not dash off the novel by seven p.m., or by next year for that matter, he has time to observe the characters, to listen to them, to allow the flesh and sinew a chance to form over the bones.

With time and nurture the characters grow larger and fiercer, more vivid and vital, while the so-called real world, with all its walking ghosts and humdrum agitations, recedes to a dreamy background, a loud sunny place by the beach where the novelist surfaces for a few breaths before diving back down into the reefed caverns of the story. The result is that during this tumultuous gestation period, the novelist is semi-absent from the world, just as he would be if suffering from a severe sickness. He may even degenerate into a social imbecile. Financial woes and family obligations will naturally intrude and shorten these writing bouts, but the general picture holds: the novelist, while working on the novel, has more in common with a zombie or a misanthrope than with the ancient Greek ideal of the active and responsible citizen.

The reporter on the other hand is a social and political creature, bound up whether she likes it or not in officialdom and in daily life. Unlike the inward and socially inept novelist, the reporter is the ultimate cross-class socialite, talking at once with government ministers and striking miners, bird watchers and poachers, Nobel Laureates and butchers, Neo-Nazis and human rights activists. On one day she may report on a National Guard training exercise and a beer pouring competition, and on the next day on a packet of government energy measures and on an old man who shot a priest in the head outside the church over a boundary dispute.

But the animated and hectic life of the reporter means that she spends time with everyone except herself. Whereas the novelist suffers from an excess of solitude and grim soul-staring, the reporter suffers—like the partied-out party animal—from an excess of socializing and of day-to-day hullabaloo. The excess may be good for learning to get along in the world and to speak fluidly, but the reporter is so busy holding a mirror up to the world that she has no real opportunity to turn it upon herself. Even the reporting style, with its sober third-person narration (According to police sources, the 12-year-old boy who drove the Mercedes into the eucalyptus tree was….) and the subsuming of the individual into the newspaper (The Defense Spokesman told the Fourth Night yesterday that an investigation is currently…) is an effort to annihilate any sense that there is an individual behind the article.

Whenever the reporter is not rushing about to ‘gather material’ and ‘get quotes,’ she is striking keys at high speeds. Working at a daily newspaper is like flutter-kicking upright in a pool with your arms extended overhead: you can keep your head above water only if you keep kicking. There is no space in the world of the reporter for that decadent, self-indulgent, pansy pastime known as writer’s block. The reporter may occasionally face writer’s cubes, which she will then gruffly kick aside, but the blocks are for the leisured novelists, who only haul them out because they are looking for something to rest on with an easy conscience. Nothing can better draw out the Muses—even if they croak instead of sing—than a deadline.

There is, however, one type of reporter who may lapse into writer’s block. I am talking about the fresh novelist-turned-reporter. That reporter, still a newcomer to the art of machine-gun writing, occasionally falls back into the quicksand writing habits of his former self—and often at the very worst time.

The second and final part of this essay is the December 4 posting

Constantine Markides