Internal writing conflict... UPDATED!

I've decided I'm going to go with the version I like, the one with the edits from this site. I'm going to take the advice the two people at my paper gave regarding some style points and line edits, but I'm not going to bother overhauling the entire lead. I like the way it reads as is.

I wonder if part of the problem, and this very likely is simply me defending my story, but I wonder if part of the problem is that my paper is small, and never runs long features written in this style. The features we run tend to be of the "Look at Johnny Quarterback -- he's having a great season and here are some kind words from his coaches and teammates" kind of stories. So this story is quite a bit different, more magazine-ish I guess, than what we normally run, and so it being so different makes those higher-ups than me question the lede.

But then again, it could just be that I'm trying to defend my story against people telling me to change a big chunk of it, so who knows.

Either way, though, I feel like I learned a lot as a writer and improved a great deal over the course of writing this. I feel like I challenged myself a great deal to write it the way I did, which is far different than anything I've written before, and because I feel like I learned a lot about getting interesting details and incorporating them into my writing. And I really enjoyed it, too. I found I like writing these kinds of long, magazine-style pieces. Hopefully I'll get to do more in the future.

Thanks again everyone for your help, especially jgmacg and friend of the friendless.

 

Glad to hear it, Rusty. Any writer has to learn to trust his or her own work.


Let us know how it goes. Thanks for sharing it with us.