Going through old clips

My blushing bride-to-be and I are moving soon, so we're going through and packing up all our respective shit. Last night, I happened upon a binder of my old clips, both sports and news, dating to the mid-1990s.

I marveled at how dreadful my early writing was. At my first job, I had a weekly column, and it's fairly evident when I had nothing to write about and would try to pull a rabbit out of my hat. I'd guess 75 percent of my early columns were drivel. I wonder how I ever got jobs in journalism handing prospective employers this shit as a shining example of my work.

I then skipped ahead to my news clips. I was so much better at that than sports.

Do you ever go through yours? What do you think of your work in hindsight?

 

I guarantee you that reading anything I wrote my first two years in the business would leave me shaking my head in disgust.

With the exception of stuff that I pulled for my portfolio, I almost never read my own stuff after it was filed. My mentor told me to start doing that in 1997 or 1998 or so and it was really good advice. "You file it, you move on to the next story."

It prevented me from obsessing over what was cut and why and getting worked up over stuff that I couldn't do anything about.

 

I am horrified by everything I have ever put into print and make it a point not to read a word of it the moment it's printed and too late to make any changes.

 

I look back at my old stuff and I wonder how I got the job that I did out of college.

I definitely wasn't good, but I was fast and clean, and I think that mattered more than the other factors.

I had also been a stringer and interned at the same paper, so that didn't hurt either.

 

This really needs to be quoted out of context.

 

Did I miss the thread announcing No. 3?

 

If we wrote for our audience instead of ourselves, that's how all sports stories would read.

 

Kinison.

Listen to him.

 

Nice pull.

 

I find looking back at clips from my first couple of years serves for a trip into depression and embarrassment. I tend not to do it. There are several clips where I go "WTF was I thinking?"