Reporter explaining why he stayed up all night writing when he wasn’t on deadline:

I’ve found that writing trips are like drug trips … you just have to go with ’em and hope they don’t take you anywhere too scary.
—Overheard in the Newsroom
writing   intellectual clot-busters   overheard in the newsroom  

Broder’s appetite for working long hours and weekends was legendary. [Washington Post colleague and political writer Dan] Balz recalled a nighttime presidential debate in the 1990s in which Broder wrote “a perfectly fine” analysis on deadline, then completely reworked it in the 45 minutes before the next edition’s deadline. He then went to his hotel room and wrote a separate column on the debate.

Young editors who grew up revering Broder’s work sometimes found themselves in the unnerving role of being his editor. Broder typically accepted their suggestions with a breezy grace, urging them to trust their instincts. He sometimes startled copy editors by thanking them for improving his articles.
“Washington Post columnist David Broder dies at 81,” Yahoo! News
david broder   support your local copy editor   wapo   writing   obituary  

Gene Weingarten on quitting pre-med and deadlines

  • Mother Jones: According to—uh—Wikipedia, you majored in psychology, but spent most of your time at the school paper. What were you writing then, and at what point did you know you wanted to do this for a living?
  • Gene Weingarten: I entered NYU intent on being a doctor, a career choice that got derailed for reasons pragmatic, emotional, and philosophical. Pragmatic: I flunked chemistry, probably the easiest course in the pre-med syllabus. Emotional: I walked into the college newspaper and discovered the elation delivered by a byline. Philosophical: I understood that with the combination of a doctor's license and my attraction to opiates, I'd likely be dead at 30. I wound up quitting college with three credits to go, to hook up with a teenage Puerto Rican street gang. It led to this [http://nymag.com/news/features/crime/48271/]. I never went back to college.
  • MJ: To parrot the predictable-journalist question you asked Garry Trudeau: Where do you come up with your ideas? Do you have a process?
  • GW: Like all writers, my greatest inspiration, my ultimate muse, is a deadline.
gene weingarten   writing   mother jones   don't let schooling interfere with education   creative limits   fertile failure   journalism  

In many ways, I am my father’s son. Once, in my 60s, I told my father, in his 90s, that I was not much like him. “How so?” he asked. I said, “I never gamble.” He laughed, a dismissive laugh, and said, “You? A freelance writer for 40 years?” He was right. He had taught me how to con people early in my life. I used that knowledge in my late 20s to hustle pool like him. I wore construction clothes at lunchtime. I conned my marks into spotting me the eight and nine in nine ball, and if I lost I always went to the men’s room, climbed out a window, and left without paying. A lesson from the old man. “Always check the men’s-room window before you play,” he said. “Because even if you lose, you’re not gonna pay.” Years later, when I became a writer, I conned editors into giving me assignments. “You got to find out what they want,” he said, “then give it to them. Tell them anything they want to hear to get the assignment, then write it the way you want.
Pat Jordan, “What I Learned From My Father, the Grifter,” Men’s Journal.
freelance writing   grifting   writing  

Austin Kleon: Dave Eggers on "selling out" vs. "saying yes"

From austinkleon, who inspired me to start a Tumblr log under my own name. Dave Eggers puts into words the free-floating urge I’ve always had to punch people who use the word “sellout”:

This e-mail is making the rounds. I’d reblog it from someone, but that would seem pointless. What I really like are the bits about the Flaming Lips and “saying yes”:

The thing is, I really like saying yes. I like new things, projects, plans, getting people together and doing something, trying something, even when it’s corny or stupid. I am not good at saying no. And I do not get along with people who say no. When you die, and it really could be this afternoon, under the same bus wheels I’ll stick my head if need be, you will not be happy about having said no. You will be kicking your ass about all the no’s you’ve said. No to that opportunity, or no to that trip to Nova Scotia or no to that night out, or no to that project or no to that person who wants to be naked with you but you worry about what your friends will say.

No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.

…

What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

Die, trolls, die.

The entire email from which this excerpt came is well worth reading. Eggers won my admiration when, after a 2002 presentation at my alma mater, he did this:

A few minutes earlier, Eggers had quietly asked a group of students around him if any were education majors. (McSweeney’s, by the way, has just opened a nonprofit writing lab for underprivileged youth in San Francisco.) When one young man said he planned to teach high school English, Eggers took out what looked like his payment for the evening—a check for $1,500—and signed it. “You’ll be underpaid your whole life,” he said. And he endorsed the check over to the student.

And why not? And goddamn it, why not?

austin kleon   dave eggers   intellectual clot-busters   mentorship   perseverance   quotes   writing