I never planned to be a writer. I wasn’t a big writer growing up. I didn’t
write fiction, never worked for the student newspaper, didn’t keep a journal. I
sort of stumbled into it by wanting to avoid any more math when I was deciding
on my college major. Math wasn’t my thing in high school.
I went through the list of majors, saw that English didn’t require math
courses and then checked out the potential jobs that English offered. Journalism
was on the list. Cool, I’ll be a journalist!
Pretty scary that I made a major life decision like that flipping through my
college catalog. It worked out OK. I make a living writing and have especially
enjoyed the past two weeks as I’ve gotten back into doing original content more
for Search Engine Land. But all that
writing has also made me reflect on the various types of writing I’ve done –
what I enjoy the most, don’t enjoy and so on.
I get a huge thrill out of deadline writing. It’s a rush. In my short
newspaper days, I did more of this. I sometimes do with blogging news, as well.
I particularly remember
writing
when the Google IPO documents were filed. I had the filing up on one of my
screens, and I just started going at it. What were the big topics? What charts
could I make quickly? How fast could I summarize AND through in observations and
references.
Deadline newspaper writing, when you’re being fed material from various
reporters, is even more a rush. I’ve done that a few times. Many more I’d watch
veteran journalists do it from the material I and others were feeding. Things
were flowing in from everywhere, and the writer would somehow make sense of it
all.
I love and hate the big issue piece. I love talking with a variety of people,
gathering up all the opinions and understanding a subject. But I hate sitting
down and trying to bring it all together. The talking is much more fun than the
work of that writing. But when I finally push through it, I’m happy.
Similarly, I love and hate big feature pieces. When I was in newspapers, I
did a number of these — topics such as the rise of Speed Racer, for example.
Again, the talking and research was fun. The crafting of a feature piece, trying
to paint a picture in words, was hard. But getting past it to a finished product
was wonderful.
I had one glorious summer of feature writing, when I was an intern for the
Anaheim Bulletin so many years ago. To that point, all my writing had been for
my college newspaper. That also meant all my writing was wedged between
coursework (often neglected) and real work (to pay for college). When I did my
internship (which paid nothing for three months), I’d saved enough to get
through the summer without working another job. That meant I could put my all
into my writing. I’d did these loving features about someone who grew a giant
tomato (mutant fruit articles are an intern’s specialty); on a blood drive; on a
church ushers’ convention. It was one of the best summers of my life, just
writing and not worrying about anything else.
In college, I did some fiction writing classes. I determined that I fairly
suck at fiction writing. I’m too logical a writer. I like to explain things. I
don’t have the mind to craft a story out of mid-air.
I used to think that fiction writing would be easy. With non-fiction writing,
there’s was always that quote you wished someone had said differently, or that
last bit of research you wished you could have found. Fiction would be a piece
of cake! Just make up whatever you need. But that blank canvas for me turned out
to be so much harder than painting within an outline.
Just some thoughts on writing. Anyone have their own thoughts on writing they
want to share?
