Lost in notation blog

Day 82 – Distressed of Market Harborough

March 24, 2010 at 8:28 pm (bipolar, Career choices, Charity, dresses, Fashion, Fashion crime, Feminism, Job hunting, Market Harborough, Movement to stop Uggs making the world ugly, NCTJ, Newspapers, photography, Social Media, Uncategorized, Unemployment)

Today will be my last day as a freelance writer.  As of tomorrow I will have a real life proper job, this for me is very exciting but also fairly nerve racking.  Aside from brief instances of work experience it has been a year since I have held a full time office role.  I am excited but I am incredibly nervous.  thanks to difficult-jet flights and French strikes we arrived back home closer to midnight than I would like.

I have been practising my tee-line and reading my Harold Evans how to write like a journalist I am terrified I have forgotten how to write in a news style. As my regular readers know my writing tends to be rather verbose and in news it writing it is so important to be concise and one should be able to understand the who, what, where, why and when of any story preferably within the first paragraph.

When I started studying for my NCTJ I nearly quit on the third day.   Although I loved every second of it my peers were an exceptionally clever crew; we had journalists there who had worked on papers in Pakistan and San Diego or at least had a stint on their student newspaper.  Though I had written for a women’s magazine at Manchester University my experience of actual reporting was limited to a weeks work experience at the Harborough Mail and I was convinced they had made a mistake in giving me a place on the course.  Thankfully my tutor refused my resignation and instead gifted me with a copy of Harold Evans and told me to make sure it stuck out my handbag the next day at my placement.

I had the pleasure of sharing every emotional experience of the course with my good friend Kathryn.  She had come over from Ireland to study and as well as being a gymnastic coach and press officer for Northern Ireland she had already had a front page in the Irish daily papers.  I was totally in awe of her, she wrote news and fast and I wrote features with flowery prose and excessive metaphor.  The course would shape us into real life reporters who could write both but at the beginning we bumbled along together, working into the night to get our tee-line right and sharing a DVD and a bottle of red after days where the pressure had felt too much.

I have always been a Sunday Times girl of the weekend and a Guardian fan during the week.  I was a conservative liberal and loved the G2 section and lost in showbiz columns plus the crossword was actually doable for someone with as little general knowledge as myself.  When I got my first newspaper writing exam one of our tutors whilst talking it over with me said I was a natural features writer and said my stories read like they were from The Independent.  I was grinning away at this praise until she pointed out that to be a journalist I needed to write as concisely and clearly as The Express.

She told me once I was able to write in a news style I would be able to write anything but I had to lose the flowery lengthly introductions and the tongue in cheek phrases and just focus on getting the message across in as few a words as possible. In Harold Evans book, a bible of all journalists, he says one should be able to edit the Times to be The Sun and The Sun to be The Times.  The subs on the Sun are second to none and they consistently deliver headlines and opening paragraphs which grab the reader hook line and sinker.  It takes more skill as I soon found out to write a 15 word intro which grabs the reader and gets the main news across than it does to write a 30 word introduction which still leaves you unclear if the article is about a recent explosion or an unusually placed front page gardening piece.  For example:  ”As the northerly wind blew across the dust plains of war torn …. a singular bluebell fluttered its petals as it peeked its head through the everlasting earth.”  I love the style of these sorts of introductions but on the front page of a news story one really must get to the point.

This then is why I am afraid about tomorrow.  For the last three months I have been free to choose whatever written style suited my chosen prose for the day.   I have rejoiced in  the freedom of one day writing an essay about culture and sexuality and a scathing attack on the Ugg-allys the next with no instruction apart from itnternal inspiration or triggers of memory.  From tomorrow I will be returning to news-style and though I love to find a story and write it in such a way it will jump out from a page of newsprint I am afraid of how I will do after so long away from the newsroom.  I guess only tomorrow will tell but in all honesty I’m scared as hell.

• Today’s dress is on loan from my sister.  It has been great fun hanging out with her during the holiday and I’m going to miss her being around now we’re back in the UK.