How to chase a story
Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up. Joan Didion slept in the same room as her manuscripts. Jack Kerouac stood on his head and balanced himself to touch his toe tips to get his mind going. For Ray Bradbury, time would dissociate from reality when typewriting.
These writers, along with many others, share a common addiction: they loved to write and had obsessive writing rituals.
Pulling information out of journals, interviews and other primary sources, Maria Popova’s article about the daily routines of famous writers provides a close look into several writers’ minds.
She lists memorable quotes that suggest the writing process does not have a definite path, but an intricate and unusual tangle of roads: each mind is a world of its own.
Maya Angelou, for example, shares her writing disillusions in her fascinating analysis about the editing process.
She says she would start her routine early in the day, writing eight to nine pages. Then, she would go for a walk, buy groceries and cook a nice meal, pretending to be normal for a few hours.
Yet, everything would crumble apart after reading her work once again, and she would end up discarding 70 to 80 percent of it most of the time.
As she says,
That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work…But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.
The article also contains valuable anecdotes for journalists, such Benjamin Franklin’s retrospection about the good in society, Don DeLillo’s musings about Borges’ photograph and Kerouac’s sense of humor.
Ultimately, I think the article’s initial quote is the most important. Popova carefully chose her hook, emphasizing good writing is not a mistake.
E.B. White argues in the beginning of the article,
A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.
As journalists, ideal conditions to work will seldom exist. Every day, editors will expect us to crunch deadlines, pursue an ambiguous degree of objectivity and navigate our copies’ sea of clutter to find that sentence that does the job.
For instance, war correspondents travel to far away places and expose themselves to great dangers. Sports writers miss their families when the hockey, football and baseball seasons — just to mention a few — start. And if you love your family, living out a suitcase is not fun.
Writers, especially journalists, owe integrity to their readers. Yet, who says we can’t have fun too? We can choose how to prepare and chase the stories we write. So, indulge each step as if it were the last. Become a superstitious writer and find your ritual.
Photo credit: Mynameisrumpelstiltzchen.
Rara Avis 
Reblogged this on redvinylchair and commented:
I love it when I couldn’t say things better myself. …