Going through old clips

[MisterCreosote]

My blushing bride-to-be and I are moving soon, so we're going through and packing up all our respective ****. 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 **** 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?

 

[Mizzougrad96]

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.

 

[RickStain]

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.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

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.

 

[Rusty Shackleford]

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

This really needs to be quoted out of context.

 

[Stitch]

My blushing bride-to-be and I are moving soon, so we're going through and packing up all our respective ****. 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 **** 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?

Did I miss the thread announcing No. 3?

 

[Buck]

What really stood out to me was, for the sports writing phase of my career, I would not only write cliche-riddled crap, but I had a habit of using the same cliches, over and over again.

Also, I don't know why I have these clips, but I found some from an old friend at our university paper. She'd write the same lede for every gamer she wrote:

"Bum**** East beat ****sville University 5-3 on Wednesday."

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

 

[Flying Headbutt]

Did I miss the thread announcing No. 3?

It deserves its own thread? I looked for the running marriage/divorce thread, but couldn't find it.

I did mention it on the open letters thread a few days ago.

Who the hell reads that anymore?

Geez, you wasted no time at all.

 

[Flying Headbutt]

That said, congrats.

 

[Piotr Rasputin]

Kinison.

Listen to him.

 

[KYSportsWriter]

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

This really needs to be quoted out of context.

Nice pull.

 

[Beef03]

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?"

 

[Baron Scicluna]

I could never read anything of mine after it went into print. I was always worried I'd find a mistake.

 

[Starman]

I think I was a better writer 25 years ago, when I had to produce 60-80 inches of copy a day, 240 publication days a year.

A lot of it was padded crap, overbloated filler, but having to bang out a dozen gamers every game night (usually 3-4 full gamers and 6-8 follows) is truly baptism under fire.

Actually I went back and looked at stuff I wrote for high school and college classes, and believe it or not, most of it is decent. ****, there was even a book report I wrote in sixth grade I wouldn't be ashamed to hand in as a story for publication. (And which certainly whips the **** out of most of the writers currently on our staff.)

I guess I could always write, even back in grade school. The problem was I didn't learn how to TYPE until I was like 20 years old.


I have to laugh, looking back at this old stuff: I remember teachers from grade school saying "you are going to have to write and rewrite, do draft after draft after draft of everything you write. You'll do dozens of drafts sometimes."

I doubt I have ever done four drafts of anything I have ever written in my life. I suppose once we entered into the age of computers where you can move graphs and cut and paste with three keystrokes I do modify stuff time and time again which counts as a new "draft," but as far as going back and rewriting the whole thing from the start?

Hardly ever.


But I certainly wrote some columns that seem kinda dumb now in retrospect.

 

[playthrough]

Whew, my college stuff sucked. One semester I had a weekly column on the opinion page, thinking I had something to say (the opinion editor had a hard job because everyone wanted a column). I read all the stuff a decade later and discovered...nope, I had nothing to say.

 

[YGBFKM]

I stayed motivated by assuming everything I do isn't very good.

 

[forever_town]

I'm my own harshest critic when it comes to my writing, but I can look back at maybe two columns I wrote back in college that I would point to now and say were among my best writing.

With that said, I stopped obsessing about clips when I became a banker.

 

[HejiraHenry]

I usually look back at old stuff and start remembering what was going on when I was reporting and writing some particular piece of work. If I see now how I would do it better, well, that's a good sign - means I have made progress.

 

[joe]

Eighteen years since I regularly wrote for a newspaper, I still have stories -- and one in particular -- that I wish I could rewrite. My writing was always OK, but my reporter's eye sucked. As a freelance magazine writer these days, I'm a much better reporter, which makes my stories much better.

As for old clips, I think I threw most of them out in the last cleaning spasm.