“You fail every day if you’re not doing good,” said Ernest Hemingway (pictured). “When you first start writing you never fail. You think it’s wonderful and you have a fine time. You think it’s easy to write and you enjoy it very much, but you are thinking of yourself, not the reader. He does not enjoy it very much. Later, when you have learned to write for the reader, it is no longer easy to write. In fact, what you ultimately remember about anything you’ve written is how difficult it was to write it.”
Now let’s be clear, no Ernest Hemingway am I but nonetheless I have written for a living for the past 20 years. And I've picked up a few bits and pieces along the way, some of which have proven helpful.
While Hemingway was intimately familiar with war, bullfighting and hunting game, he never spent a Sunday evening in Fraher Field watching the Brickey Rangers take on Ballinameela in Senior Football Championship action. He never sat with an opened notebook during a Council meeting as the next location for the High Velocity Jet Patcher’s use was discussed with the vigour of a tented general, far from battle, contemplating his cavalry’s next offensive. That's been my reality as a regional newspaper reporter, a reality that remains a most enjoyable pursuit.
Our own lived experiences, our strengths and flaws and how we choose to view the world, be it through a half-full or half-empty glass, greatly influence both our personal and professional perspectives. But the peaks and troughs of one’s own life cannot be the means by which a reporter exclusively defines their brief. Every day in the job ought to involve a stride into the unknown, a far more illuminating task than affording too much time to rewording an overwritten press release.
And right now, amidst the Covid-19 crisis, a period in history when we’re all been asked to live and work in an altogether different way, the reduction of choice in our life actually provides us with an opportunity to make better choices by virtue of there being less choice available to us. Each day can remain interesting in the face of the sameness which at present cannot be avoided.
As a journalist, I’d be a pretty shoddy one if all I chose to write about was what I knew. Talk about limiting my options. For me, the journalist’s brief is best defined by trying to seek answers to those questions which, when first put to me, are met with the following reply: I don’t know.
The sum total of what I don’t know will exponentially exceed whatever knowledge I’ve acquired over the past 20 years in addition to whatever I’ll learn for however much time still lies ahead of me. But the prospect of eliciting new information or coming up with a different angle on an issue I’ve devoted a lot of time to over the years continues to excite me.
Journalism is unlikely to ever make me a particularly wealthy man, but it has provided me with a fascinating working life. That both of my Grandfathers were such sterling advocates of books as presents come birthdays and Christmases is one of the greatest personal legacies both men bequeathed my siblings and I.
“What are you going to write tonight?” was a question posed to me earlier. At the time, I genuinely didn’t know.
Sat on the couch, with one dog walked out at the homestead and two more to take out here in Williamstown before turning in, I semi-dozed, so much so that I’ll have to re-watch the opening episode of ‘The Mandalorian’ tomorrow. But then I dusted myself off, clicked open my laptop and got writing. And let’s face it, writing is a good deal easier on the system every night than hard liquor, the fuel many scribes have imbibed far too much of down through the decades.
The past fortnight has seen my trade conduct its duties from a host of environments none of us could have envisaged just a month ago: be it from sitting rooms, kitchen tables and hot presses.
It appears to have brought out the best in us despite considerable odds and ultimately may lead to an accelerated shift in terms of where we do our work and how we’ll primarily transmit it.
Sadly, some colleagues around the country have been temporarily laid off and one can only hope that this pandemic curve can be flattened as quickly as possible to ensure they get back to work and that their titles will survive. But in the meantime, sitting in front of a laptop with eyes fixed on that blinking cursor while contemplating the next story that needs filing continues to motivate me. Two decades in, it genuinely remains a thrill.
“There are things you do because you like to do them, other things because you have to do them,” said Hemingway. “In doing those things you find the people you write about.”
When put to him whether writing was difficult thing to do, Hemingway replied: “Not at all. All you need is a perfect ear, absolute pitch, the devotion of your work that a priest of God has for his, the guys of a burglar, no conscience except for writing, and you’re in.” I write not only because it pays the bills, but because I’ve loved it for as long as my memory has served me.
The pursuit of competence and whatever lies beyond it, remains both a great leveller and an even better motivator.
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