After one’s been writing thousands of words a week under the most stressing time management scenarios for a term, you’d think he could pop out a five hundred word editorial in an hour.
Not so.
I’ve found out this week that it takes several things for me to produce a piece of self-directed writing. The most important may be the deadline. There are two columns in the paper that must be filled, and they’ll be blank unless I fill them. Plus there’s the even greater pressure of having something together in time for the assistant editor to edit.
Second, and perhaps contrarily, there needs to be enough time for the ideas to form themselves, a process I can only call percolation. This week, for instance, I started thinking about what I would write about on Sunday night. You don’t want to start too early on something like this – a new, more important event may need addressed by the time you go to press. By Monday afternoon I had an idea of what I wanted to do.
But just because something seems like a possible topic doesn’t mean that I can actually get into it. This is where the impostor syndrome really kicks in. A versatile newspaper editor needs to be able to write about anything, right? What am I doing here? None of the topics I thought about actually seemed like something I wanted to address. Most of them could be important issues, but were either more of the same old ranting against the school (something I’m taking a break from until a new issue comes up) or something that I have no strong opinion on. Our editorial column has traditionally been strong on opinion, and I would find it hard to do anything other than an academic essay or research paper on something I’m not strongly opinionated about. Not exactly writing made to convince in five hundred words.
Tuesday evening the idea just fell apart. The supporting material just wasn’t there. I could write something about my experiences coming back from Oxford, but that would just be pretentious. Besides that, I have mixed feelings about writing about personal history and family for the editorial, a topic frequented by my predecessors. And NOTHING was happening this week. No campus scandal to comment on, no big event to talk about. I suppose I could have written about the low quality of the tea in the library. That’s about it.
So I tried to combine a little bit of everything. I needed to get started. The deadline was looming. Beside my own writing, I needed to do first cuts on several stories and make sure everything was in place for the layout and photo editors. But I was putting out disjumbled crap that came to its point in a cliched positive note of positive encouragement. So scratch out most of it, talk about it with a friend on Facebook, and hope something comes together.
It always does.
I am consistently surprised and amazed at how things like this somehow come together. Through the day Wednesday, different thoughts came to mind, starting to piece together something that would both be relatively unique, relevant, and perhaps as importantly, interesting to me. Snatches of sentences and paragraphs would come at the most inconvenient times – just after I got into bed, in the shower, during class, in the bleachers at chapel. And down they’d go in my notebook. By early afternoon there was the glimmer of possibility. I just needed to get the right atmosphere to finish it.
About three-quarters of the way through, I hit a wall. I was being distracted as things in the office started to get underway. My thoughts were going nowhere. It wasn’t done, but it would have to wait. And wait. And wait. I was afraid the editors would be after me to finish it, but they had plenty of other stories to work on.
Finally, half way through the evening, I took it and finished it. Everything came together. There was little him-hawing about the topic, or my opinion, or what I was trying to say. Somehow, the pieces came together. Still, it was rough. I wasn’t sure if I said anything like I meant to say. But that’s why editors are so important.
This whole process mystifies me. How do ideas just come together? And why don’t they come together any sooner? Is it simply a lack of practice? It could be, but I’ve talked with other people, who say that oftentimes the words and thoughts put themselves together. They just seem to bubble up from nowhere. But they come from somewhere.
Percolation, I call it.
(On the other hand, I wrote this in less than a half hour. Go figure.)
