When I sat down to my personal writing, I felt an ongoing tension between the daily grind of newspaper editing that paid my bills, contrasted to my ambitions for something more permanent, more confidential, and more creatively advanced than the anonymous work that went into the next day's trash. The pejorative "hack writer," often applied to newspapermen from the early 18th century on, was what I aspired to rise above. The term has haunted me ever since reading Samuel Johnson's derision.
In my private labor I aimed for something unique, thoughtful, sophisticated, meticulously developed, complex, and even challenging for both me and the reader. If news stories limited attribution for a quote as the neutral "said," I nearly banished that colorless word from my prose, relying instead on everything from "answered" or "asserted" to "cried" or "swore" to "wept" or perhaps "whispered," with a wide range of variants in between. Do note, I've come to treasure a thesaurus for ways in can enrichen a text and sharpen the underlying thought and feelings, even though doing so requires additional time and consideration.
My journals, on the other hand, sought mostly to catch up on my life from the previous entry, often in cryptic terms I might get back to and fill in later, though that rarely happened.
~*~
Hemingway could write for a sixth-grade level reader because he was no longer in a newsroom. It could kill you, believe me, if it's all you got to do.
I needed to foster my literary ambitions simply to keep my editing skills sharp.
It did make for tension in my private work, though. I still love a good 250-word sentence.
~*~
Let me also say something of the ethics. Being told not to wear a politician's campaign button. No appearance of partisanship. Leonard Downing of the Washington Post even refused to vote in an election for fear it would taint his neutrality or objectivity.
Were we, as one girlfriend taunted me, ethically castrated? My first editor, Glenn Thompson, worked behind the scenes to get progressive things in motion and did urge us interns to have causes.
By the way, I have worked for some very conservative papers and also some very liberal ones. It didn't affect what I did for them.
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