Keeping a Standard

I was talking with a friend and colleague the other day, and we were both shaking our heads at some writers we've heard boast of knocking off a thousand word piece in a very few hours, including interviews and research. Apparently the clients didn't mind, and the results were high hourly rates and, in the case of one, a high annual gross.

I'm all for making money, and I'm all for being efficient. But there is something about the take-two-interviews-and-write-a-thousand-words-by-morning approach that bothers me. I could put it off to jealousy, and yet I don't get that way about some colleagues who I know pull down far more than I do, and yet still undertake what I'd see as a reasonable number of interviews for a single article. (For those doing corporate work, feel free to substitute a lot of interviewing of people in the company and researching the product or service.)

What bothered me, I think, was the process of cutting corners. Writing has to be about more than just making money. If you're interested only in the monetary world, there are many occupations and businesses that can deliver in greater abundance. I've found myself similarly bristling when hearing, "Because I'm only getting paid X, there's only so hard I'm going to work on the assignment."

I really don't get that attitude. If you have a connection to the craft of writing, then you have respect for the process and what it can do. Good writing requires putting the needs of the story and the craft first - while ensuring that you've made arrangements for sufficient remuneration to keep your life from rising up and revolting. (Or so your life isn't revolting, for a different view.) If I've taken a shot at an assignment and it legitimately needs a rewrite, I rewrite. It comes with the territory, and if you're going to spend the time doing something, you might as well be proud of what you have done.

There are secondary business benefits. For example, if you keep hacking through assignments, then your clips will read like hack work, and you'll find it more difficult to land assignments at top publications, or even to muster the writing muscle to tackle various types of articles to your satisfaction. Given the large amounts of snow that have fallen in the last two weeks where I live, I'll use a winter analogy told to me by a pastor. He and his wife lived for years in northern Maine. He remembered their first snow fall there, and he was perplexed to see people plowing not only their driveways, but their entire yards. "I soon learned why," he said. So much snow fell annually that residents had to clear room so by the end of the season, they could still remove the snow from their sidewalks and driveways and have somewhere to put it.

Throughout your career, you need to make room for new techniques and approaches to story telling. When a writer takes the easy way out, he or she is actually only plowing the driveway and not the lawn in those first snowfalls. You become fixed in your approach, because you're now focusing on speed and efficiency, not on quality.

If you care at all about the writing craft, you have to keep reaching to do better, research more deeply, understand more thoroughly. All of this increases your ability to tell a story. To do that, you push aside the old tricks and concepts and keep turning into a wide-eyed student, always trying to grasp what it possible. That way, what you write becomes better and has more substance to it. You may make fewer dollars, but I've found that people who rely on their income as a measure of their self-worth always sound a little hollow. At least in my opinion, that's no way to go through life.