What I might miss

Some days are productive because stories flow seamlessly and I check everything off my to-do list (this happens approximately once a year, at best.) Others are productive because of the hours I spend removing material from stories. No-one except myself knows the work I put into removing 100 words from a little news story that will slip into internet oblivion within a few hours, assuming it ever emerges from obscurity in the first place.

It would have been easy enough to let the two quotes slide. They added a little zing to my story, weren't entirely inaccurate, and would have been easily forgiven if found, I think. After all, I'm a journalist, they're the experts, and I faithfully reported what they told me. My previous editor would have chided me for being pedantic. My current editor didn't particularly care until I brought it up. Perhaps I am being a stickler, and I'd be more productive if I wrote fast and didn't stop to think. But I did, and I probably will every time I write.

Without an organization, an instructor or a boss to back me up, I'm the only one who can convince myself it was worth the extra hours and re-writing. This, I tell myself, is why it's called my reputation, not my editors' or my sources'. There's one misleading quote less among the reams of misinformation that inundate the interwebs. I've learned to fact-check at every single stage, even after an editor I trust reads my copy, even when I quote reputable sources who mean perfectly well. Some days, being productive is about spending three hours triple-checking my facts and teaching myself how not to screw up. Hello, freelance life.

Elemental

Some books have a way of coming home to roost. This one wandered in from a box left outside a library near a park, recommended by a friend as we browsed together. I sneezed over the musty pages, snuggled into the old-fashioned language, and remembered how a simple story can feel solid as the earth beneath my feet.

"She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and rearing and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions."

(The book: My Antonia, by Willa Cather)