Breinthewild

This one’s about lessons from journalism.

See, good books and the occasional writing teacher taught me about joy: the spark of writing, the feel of it, how to spot the muse and entice it to stick around. This important in the beginning. You have to learn the love.

But then you have to learn the work.

This is something I never quite got around to in English class. When you’re decent at writing (or rather, grammar and spelling) most essays take 15 minutes. That’s not work, it’s a minor inconvenience.

However, I was lucky enough to attend high school at a time when the school newspaper still existed. Many programs of the like have since faded or been replaced with a more ‘modern’ counterpart. (My own high school has gone the route of the ‘online magazine’). The paper part is important because it allowed me to see my work physically out in the world. I could hold it in my hands and see other students reading it.

I was also lucky enough to have a teacher who was not merely good at his job but brilliant at it (a fact he would humbly try to dispute if you said it to him outright). His name was Gene. I asked him once if I could dedicate a book to him should I ever manage to get one published. He said yes and I truly, deeply hope I get the chance to do so.

The newspaper came out every two weeks on a Friday. It needed to be done every two weeks by Thursday so it could be printed. This deadline was non-negotiable. It did not matter if your cat died or your car broke down or you were caught smoking in the bathroom and ended up in detention, the paper published. Two weeks later, it published again. And again. It never stopped.

This was a major problem when I first started because at that point I only wrote when I felt ✨ inspired ✨ (meaning I rarely wrote at all). Suddenly I was expected to churn out a 500 word feature on the courtyard’s new bear statue in less than a week without feeling the spark? Insanity.

Yet the deadline still loomed. My options were:

1) Get to work, hating every word OR

2) Bail and leave a gaping hole on page 6, drawing the wrath of the page editor and that tiny, disapproving frown so rarely seen from Gene.

So I wrote. Trash, largely. But damn if I didn’t finish what I started.

There were many crises, tiny in hindsight, that at the time seemed overwhelming. Entire pages crashed last-minute and needed to be redone. 1,000-word stories never got turned in. A beautifully-planned photo spread ended up mangled in the hands of an amateur with nothing but blurry photo after blurry photo to fill the space.

It didn’t matter. The deadline remained. And somehow, no matter how ridiculous the problem, we always came up with a solution. If we were hard stuck, Gene would offer a few suggestions to point us in the right direction but I can count on one hand the number of times he actually stepped in to ‘fix’ whatever had gone awry. It was our paper. We had to make the call.

Did I apply these lessons to my own personal writing immediately? Of course not! But I’d done it before and every time I felt the urge to bail on a project (which was and is quite often) I was reminded of those newspaper days. Keep going. Most writerly-type-sites will offer this advice at least once during their run because it’s true. You have to keep going. Whatever your brilliant idea is, that spark that made you fall in love with a story, once the shine wears off you have to work to unearth it.

I was just lucky enough to have a brilliant teacher and a great class to teach me that lesson before I even knew what to do with it.