Weak Tea
… I've been seeing this phrase pop up a lot, recently, and it's a pretty good summing up of how I've felt about the things I've written so far. Weak tea: fills the cup, but there's not much there.
Mostly I'm down on the things I've chosen to write about. This past weekend, the assignment was to go find a story on our beat at one of the following locations: a sports event, a religious event, or a funeral home. After a lot of poking around and a lot of talking to various people, I still wound up with a lame story about a pedestrian bridge over to the Bronx due to be reopened next year which, as it turns out, nobody around either endpoint feels strongly about. (The Manhattan end is in a park which contains the two baseball games I was originally scoping out when I walked up there. Pretty frickin' tenuous connection, but it was what I had when I was on deadline.)
Danger Tea
Yesterday I went out to do a little radio piece on an event with a beginning, middle, and end. Classmates chose all-night fish markets, AM newspaper distributors… me? My brain froze up and I suggested the surprisingly coordinated parking dance on street cleaning days, as everyone simultaneously double-parks on the other side of the street, waits for the cleaner, and moves back. Went out yesterday morning to tape it, and was putting it together last night. It's a total yawner. I made stupid mistakes — didn't ask one guy to turn his car radio off while I interviewed him, which made him nearly uneditable, and got sufficiently engaged in conversation with another subject that I animatedly talked over the end of what would have been a great line to include in the piece — and asked inane questions.
Danger!
To be fair, I wasn't expecting to show up at J-school and suddenly be interviewing shadowy government sources in parking garages or writing "The Corner." Hoping, certainly; expecting, no. I'm just feeling a little disheartened at my lack of ability to discern a good, interesting story. I can write enough to fill a given word-count, but I'm not really happy with what I've produced.
Then again, after a restless night of odd, urgent/responsible dreams, I produced another cup of tea this morning on a stove with a serious warning label. Despite the dire warnings, I made my cup of Irish Breakfast tea without dying. So maybe the lesson I need to learn in journalism is the same one I'm learning with this stove: Any cup of tea you can walk away from is a good one.
August 24th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
If it’s any consolation both my first beat class and my first radio class assignments were, well, not so amazing. I also had expected to be instantly good at both. I write well and I talk well. So what could be hard about those assignments. But rest assured, not that this sounds helpful now, but it all starts to come more easily. All I’ve read is your blog but you deffinitely have a great voice and that’s the best thing to start with. The other stuff just comes with time. So all that to say keep plugging away, good luck and you’ll do great.