Tag: newsroom

The Birthday Box

Today is my birthday. A milestone, so that narrows it down some. But I am not going to share exactly how old I have become today. The reason is old-fashioned and likely a little vain. For my mother, it was a survival strategy. Especially in the workplace.

Mom used to talk about “the box people put you in.” Once people knew how old you were, she reasoned, they made assumptions. Often erroneous. Inevitably “limiting.” It is still the way it is “out there.” A 19-year-old singer on America’s Got Talent is viewed more favorably than a 27-year-old. Longer-term marketability, the younger they are.

In Mom’s case, she was a woman in a profession dominated by men. Truth be told in her generation, every professional field was dominated by men. There were a lot of truths about living in that reality, shared as sly witticisms that most women could relate to.

“To do as well as a man in the workplace, women have to be twice as good and work twice as hard as men do. Fortunately, that isn’t difficult.”

Or a more veiled reference: “It is hard to soar with eagles when I am surrounded by turkeys.” I remember a cartoon that circulated in Mom’s workplace. A down and dejected bald eagle is in the center of a group of blank-looking turkeys. The point hit home.

I knew the frustration of being expected to be a “hard news” reporter when that was the predominant role respected in our TV newsroom. If your strength was current affairs or my wheelhouse, human interest, you were clearly of less value than the ambulance chasers or political analysts.

Never mind that I actually enjoyed doing human interest pieces and that they were well-received. They were never going to grant me a shot at being a war correspondent or a bureau chief or heading up a newsroom.

Mom’s challenge was even harder in the 60s. There were distinct “ladies’ pages” in the newspaper business. And ladies, of course, were expected to “cover” issues of interest to other ladies. Teas, weddings, and significant births and deaths in the community. The social pages. Writing obituaries was clearly women’s work.

Mom fought for a “beat” like her male colleagues. After much cajoling and complaining she finally got her wish. She ended up covering the port of Saint John, New Brunswick with the comings and goings of major vessels and reports on the cargo they carried.

To my chagrin, she liked to announce to all and sundry when I was too young to see the humor that she had a job “working the waterfront.” The conjured image of my mother in fishnet stockings and too-high heels made me writhe in discomfort when she shared her little joke with my friends.

Today is more of a day of stock-taking for me. I look back on the other birthdays of other significant decades. I think about what I have and haven’t accomplished. Most poignant, of course, have been challenges that I did and those I did not overcome. Loss became a constant companion if not exactly a friend.

My dear friend Ursula Wawer, MD became a forensic psychiatrist. On a trip we once took, she seized upon a piece of art. It was a drawing of a maze of sorts with many paths but all leading ultimately to the same destination. She said at the time it was much like the healing path many of her patients took.

Not everyone comes to the same desirable destination of love, peace, and fulfillment via the same path. Ursula concluded it doesn’t matter how you get there. What does matter is that you keep putting one foot in front of the other. Do the work to eventually arrive where you want to be and not where others deem that you should be. That journey can take a lifetime.

And so it has been for me. Lots of learning along the way and many lessons I would rather have read about in a book instead of learning about them firsthand. Life isn’t fair and that is one of the biggest and most important learnings of all.

When you land at a point of your life at a destination you only once dreamed about, that feels like a life – if not consistently well-lived – then at least you can say it has been a life of some value.

As I “celebrate” my birthday today, just as you might be celebrating yours today or soon or certainly someday, that feels like the greatest present of all.

My life to date has been valuable to me for all the challenges, children, lessons, dear friends, adventures, and romantic experiences along the way.

I greet the upcoming decade with a warm welcome. Intention being about 99% of the success of any endeavor – another lesson I’ve learned. Bring it on. Happy birthday to me.

Artistic Long Game

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”​—Glenn Gould, Concert Pianist

This quote says so much about what I believe. An artistic path is not necessarily the most financially lucrative pursuit. There has to be something else in it that makes people pursue their art. Or else not many people would pursue art in spite of painfully thin paychecks.

People usually start out in life with vague hopes and dreams. Finding out what they are and manifesting those hopes and dreams is a major preoccupation of young people. Along with learning the basics of what it means to be good citizens, young people set out to fill up their quiver of basic marketable skills.

I silently smirk when I see misleading ads promising would-be writers how to acquire the required skills to make thousands and thousands of dollars a year as a freelance writer. The so-called skills they are touting are misleading, to say the least.

Writing success is an alchemy of talent, opportunity, luck, and mostly hard work. But mostly it is stick-to-it-ism. Writers write. Every aspiring writer knows the sober adage to “put their bum in the seat” and stare down the blank page.

I am bemused by scads of advice currently circulating about developing your voice, setting tone in stories, and developing characters and plots. I have been in the writing business my whole life. I had never seen it treated as much like a “business” as it is today.

Writing was historically generated by people with a basic talent for writing. Producing copy for stories or novels or articles was a type of alchemy. The story was the thing. With the right storyline in the right context with great quotes and color commentary on where the story was based, under the skilled attention of a gifted writer, voila! a decent story would be born.

There was a hierarchy in the newsroom I worked in. We knew who the steady and reliable producers were. They could be counted on to bang out stories on cue and as needed.

Along with those steady producers were writers of varying talents with varying dependability. But if they had won jobs in a newsroom, you could at least assume they knew how to write.

Writing as art evolves. In my experience, the art of writing emerges when an individual begins to develop and use their own voice. So much writing is formulaic. It isn’t hard to teach someone how to write according to the standard inverse triangle required for newspaper articles. Broadcasting copy whether for TV or radio was much the same. Learn the formula and you can do the job.

Creative writing is another avocation. There is something that develops inside an individual when they dig deep to manifest the stories and insights they harbor inside their hearts and minds. It requires insight and curiosity and the ability to ask questions that needed to be asked. This is harder to define but most people recognize superior writing when they see it.

This can take a lifetime of repeated practice by working at their craft. As time passes and the craft is further developed, good writers start to abandon hyperbole. Clear writing is a result of clear thinking. And clear thinking comes from refining and exposing the essence of the stories writers want to tell.

Ernest Hemingway nailed this. His writing was delivered in short, staccato-like sentences that could sum up the beauty or ugliness of a situation in a few concise words. Hemingway started as a journalist and that style ultimately defined his novel writing style.

I have often been bemused by my own writing journey. After a few short years in a newspaper newsroom, I went to university. My first year of university generated many comments from professors about my “choppy, journalistic” writing style.

So I learned about “padding” in university. I would add as many high-sounding, convoluted words as possible to make my academic essays sound profound and knowledgeable. Mostly my essays were simply full of “fat writing.” Why say in ten words – the academic attitude seemed to be – what you can just as easily say in forty-five? No wonder academia is recognized as a game.

Success in academia was mostly guaranteed by the degree to which you could parrot exactly what the professor had doled out in lectures. Original thought and ideas were not as encouraged as one might think in the hallowed halls of education. Conformity was the bigger goal, not originality. Who were we to question the geniuses we were studying?

So I was happy to be reminded by Glenn Gould’s quote that pursuing an artistic path is a path to cultivating peace and serenity and wonder. It is a lifelong pursuit. It is also a very individual one.