Chronicled triumphs & defeats from the mind of an always-aspiring Winnipeg writer.

One of the most frustrating things that I’ve encountered as a journalist thus far, is outside interference from pens that are not my own.

Everything that I wrote over the summer, was required to be proofed with the contacts who contributed to the story, before it could be published.  This is a great way to make sure you don’t piss off the people who have probably purchased advertising space in the publication, but it also creates a lot of headaches and additional time for the writer.

Sometimes it’s so hard to get ahold of the person you need to speak to for a story, that the thought of then having to engage in email correspondence with them after the story is written just depresses me.  The story is written, but a lot of the time, that’s the easiest part.  Sometimes it would take me upwards of five emails to get someone to send their corrections back to me.

And here’s where we come to the part of getting corrections that I don’t necessarily agree with.  Maybe they’ve inserted a new quote, or a piece of information that not only adds nothing to the story, but also derails the entire flow of it.  It’s senseless to get into a virtual argument over it, because it’s way too time consuming, and ultimately, the reason I sent them the article was so that they could make these changes.

It’s hard to “finalize” an article that is not entirely your own, and have your name stamped on it.  Luckily, I never encountered anything that was too awful, but there are definitely people out there who should not be writing; until they learn how.

As Journalism students, we (likely) all have a certain flair for the written word.  Every so often, I think back to the days when I was just a young lad, and specifically the writing that I used to do.

I started when I was about seven years old, on a Macintosh that I’m pretty sure is older than time itself.  For the technologically-inclined among us, I believe the hard drive space on the thing 99 Megabytes.  Not even one Gigabyte.  And to think that I just ordered a portable hard drive the size of my hand that’s got 1 Terabyte of storage… but I digress.

I wrote the dumbest stories you can imagine when I was young.  And I loved it; absolutely loved it.  I can distinctly remember the feeling of just having a thought or a concept come into my head, and being insanely pumped to go sit down at the computer to form and write a story about it.

This strays a little bit from the topic of just straight “journalism” of course, because no, at seven years old I was not breaking compelling local stories.  I was writing fiction, but I think any journalist worth his salt will agree that story-telling is a crucial aspect to a good story, whether it’s fiction or not.

One of the first stories I ever wrote was called “Wing-Wa-Soo: Fighting Chinese Monkey”.  It was a story about a monkey, whose owner was cruel and kept him caged up all day long.  So one day, he decided to teach himself kung-fu from within the confines of his cage, and the next time his owner opened the cage to feed him, he beat him up and escaped.

Can’t believe I actually just publicized that information.

I still have the folder that houses every short story I wrote when I was a kid, and, of course, all of them are pretty brutal.  But they are a reminder of why I am where I am, and how I got here.  They remind me to never underestimate the most basic but important aspect of journalism; story-telling.

If you can remember the very first story or piece of writing you ever wrote, feel free to share it.  Chances are it’s not as embarrassing as mine!