Writing

I always forget how little I actu­ally like the writ­ing process.

I like research. I like inter­view­ing. I love feel­ing import­ant and saying “Hi, I’m a journ­al­ist call­ing on behalf of (pub­lic­a­tion).” I even like tran­scrib­ing inter­view tapes. I fall in love with what people say to me. I’m fas­cin­ated by their lives, their opin­ions, their atti­tudes. I love that my work gives me license to be a nosey parker.

I don’t mind struc­tur­ing a story, look­ing for pat­terns, work­ing out common threads. I can write nar­rat­ives, weav­ing these people’s words in with facts and back­ground and description.

But I hate pick­ing and choos­ing, leav­ing things out. I always write long. And then I have to cut. At first it’s okay, just edit­ing my own work, look­ing for lazi­ness, repeated phrases, clumsy con­struc­tions. And then it’s hor­rible. A word here. A sen­tence there. Read­ing the same story, over and over and over, trying to decide which para­graphs live and which die. I can do this to other people’s work without hes­it­a­tion. But these sen­tences are the stor­ies I’ve been told and I have a respons­ib­il­ity to my respond­ent to present their story accur­ately, not to skimp and use them.

And I hate the feel­ing that I *can’t* write, that the writ­ing is ped­es­trian, because it’s not as florid as my poetry, because all the words are every day words. I read art­icles from The Guard­ian and I think, how did I ever think I could write?

Anyhow, I just need to cut another 280 words out of this #&@^$*$)@$_$R@_*$@&$ art­icle and it will all be okay.