cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On the Air Today I'm recording an essay for NPR. It will air regionally on M0rning Edition on Monday. I had the idea on Monday when I heard someone else's retarded essay that I wanted to respond to, immediately sent an email to the bureau chief, she sent an email back that day asking me to write a 3 minute piece. Then I didn't get around to writing anything until yesterday, at which point I wrote the whole thing in literally 20 minutes. 15 minutes after that, she responded with a few edits that I agreed to and we scheduled a time for me to come in to the studio today to record it. Pow. I admit that this is not going to be my best possible work. There is nothing especially poetical or arresting about it. I wrote that fucker in 20 minutes, after all. But it is fine and workmanlike and will be 10 times better than most of the crap commentary that I hear on NPR. The important thing was not to make it perfect. The important thing was to instantly give the NPR bureau chief exactly what she needed right when she needed it so that I have provided her with useful and timely content. That way I will be asked to do this for them again and again and again and I will continue to build my audience and constituency through this new avenue. My mother has been a commentator for NPR for the last 14 years. So I know a very awful lot about how to do this. She started doing it because she had written a few novels and couldn't get published and wanted some kind of credentials. But she had no idea how to write an essay. I, at the age of 16 or 17, had recently read all of the collected radio essays of Daniel Pinkwater and was a pretty prolific writer myself at the time. I had very definite ideas about how one should go about writing a good radio essay for NPR: do it just like Pinkwater. I assigned her a copy of 'Fishwhistle' to read. I told her to keep it to about 3 minutes, accentuate her regional accent, establish a thesis in her opening lines and return to it at the end. This was precocious of me and I know now that there are other ways of doing radio commentary well, but in retrospect it was actually pretty good advice. All along I knew that I would eventually end up doing radio commentary for public radio at some point. But I never submitted anything until now. I was thinking about the reasons for this while driving home from work yesterday and here is what it boils down to. I have been writing like a maniac since I was in middle school. By my sophomore year of high school I was doing all of the writer-y things. 3 week summer workshops on college campuses, local readings at book stores, ditching school to go to book festival events. I won National Merit awards for English several years in a row. I co-taught writing classes at my high school and helped lead workshops. I got an internship at a local paper and got to write copy sometimes. One would expect that someone like this would be desperately seeking publication as soon as possible. Nope. After college I kept writing. I wrote a weekly column on current events and another one on big ideas. A sort of futurist thing in which I described emerging technologies and discussed what their effect on society and geography would be. It was actually not bad. Every week I would write these columns and edit them and polish them and print them out and put them in a manila folder and did absolutely nothing else with it. This expanded to other types of writing. Over the last 10 years I would estimate that I have written, on average, about 5,000 words every week. Probably over 2.5 million words in that time. And I never tried to get anything published, aside from a few months during which I briefly established myself as a regular contributor to several Taiwanese newspapers on defense issues (seriously: what the fuck?). Why didn't I try to get published? Because it wasn't good enough. I mean, I'm sure I could have had some success but it would have been about the writing rather than the content. Because at those ages of around 15-27 I didn't really have anything to say that the world absolutely needed to hear. Now I do. I am annoyed by really writer-y writers. People whose whole identity is forged around this idea of being a writer. But that is what I would have been if I'd been getting published right out of college. Another fucking wanker, in love with his own prose. My approach now is based on the idea that I don't want the reader to be thinking about the writing at all. I want the focus to be on the ideas and information or story that I'm telling. I want the reader to inhabit what I'm saying. The medium is not my message. My writing for public consumption (which this diary is not) is intended to be workmanlike and useful to both the publisher and the reader. So suddenly I emerge fully formed. The woman who greenlit my commentary for NPR was amazed at the fact that I had instantly handed her the kind of piece that they usually have to squeeze slowly out of contributors and edit all to hell once it finally shows up a week late. What I didn't tell her was that I'd written dozens of these things for myself already and had helped to edit countless more that other NPR contributors had written. I feel like I have a pretty good message overall and that I am now entitled to a public voice. Its ok for me to seek publication now. 4:59 p.m. - 2010-06-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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