Writing

10/12/2011

1 Comment

 
Last week, after rejecting another one of my articles (it ain't easy to get published around here, folks, even if you're already on staff), my editor gave me a helpful article with tips on writing. Most of it was fairly standard journalistic fare - "periods always do the job better than semicolons," "you lose half your readers every time they have to turn the page," etc. - but one piece of advice caught my attention and I  haven't been able to stop thinking about it ever since.

"Waiting for le mot juste is silly," the piece read. "Journalists aren't Flaubert. He wrote for the ages. Journalists write for today, this week, or this month. The stuff is perishable."

This might be silly, but that paragraph, in a small way, broke my heart. I know I'm not the next Flaubert, or even the next Nicholas Sparks (God forbid). But somewhere deep down in my literary heart, I like the idea that people will read what I've written long after I wrote it. I can't help thinking that what I write will last. If it won't, then excuse me for asking, but why bother writing it? And in a small way, that paragraph even made me wonder, am I really meant to be a journalist? Writing for the moment seems pointless, while laboring over the Great American Novel strikes me as a fine use of my time. I guess what I'm really asking is, can you be a journalist and still wait for le mot juste? Still write for the ages? Still, in even the smallest of ways, write things that will last?

- Tess
1 Comment
Joey
10/14/2011 09:52:08 am

Tess, I think the point is that, because journalistic writing is more ephemeral and time-sensitive than, say, novel-writing, you don't have time to labor over every word and be a complete perfectionist. That being said, you can still have fun trying to come up with clever wordings and well-turned phrases, especially in longer feature-type articles (i.e., ones that aren't just straight news).

And, even though the stuff you are writing will rarely be read after the next issue comes out, you can still see it as "writing for the ages." Even if people only read your story once, what they read stays in their mind and, in some slight way, changes them. Even if they forget about it a minute later, you never know when ten years later your article might pop into their head. Of course, the more important the subject matter of the article is, the more likely this is. But with every article you write, you are (hopefully) bringing truth into the world and stuffing it into people's brains, a little bit at a time.

Nevertheless, I have been having similar doubts to yours about journalism, although I was never really sure I wanted to be a journalist in the first place, and my doubts revolve more around the question of superficiality. I feel like it doesn't take that much to be your average news journalist, because all you're really doing is putting information on a page, the who-what-when-where-why. After doing this for only a few short weeks, I started to feel about it like the ancients felt about history--"It's just one damn thing after another." If you're always just staying at that surface level, is it really doing much? Is it helping anyone? I feel a need to go deeper into things, into the overarching causes, into the deeper significance of events. I guess then you run the opposite risk of losing yourself in the abstraction of theory. But I just feel like I can do more.

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