Where Writing Comes From

.
Divine Inspiration

“Who knows where anything comes from in writing? Seamus Heaney tells of sensing a destiny in his poems directed by God, but whatever forces are credited, there’s little question that most writers feel some inspirational push or tug connected with the work. And the inspirations have mysterious maps. Many a writer has started out certain of a particular direction only to change course midway, as though a ghost’s hand took the tiller.”  

—Roger Rosenblatt, writer, “The Invisible Forces That Make Writing Work,” New York Times, Aug. 25, 2017.

• Editorial Comment: That ghost also can be a terrible speller.



PeezPix by Ted Pease

Journey’s End









Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

David Carr’s Journalism

.
No Fear

“I’ve been a single parent, I’ve been poor, I waited tables, I was an addict and in recovery. It makes things that would or should seem scary seem not so scary at all. There’s nothing that could happen to me at work that would seem scarier than other things that have happened throughout my life.

“I mean, I still get nervous. I still get nervous about making that call, I’d circle the phone, but I always make the call. You have to. That’s journalism.”
 

—David Carr (1956-2015), journalist, in Amanda Connolly, “A life of survival: David Carr of The New York Times,” The Edition, 2013

• Editorial Comment: What’s the worst that could happen?

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Streetlight













Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Fire-Starting News

.

The Daily Newspaper

“A biography of something greater than a man. It is the biography of a DAY. It is a photograph, of twenty-four hours’ length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year’s newspapers — which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written — and we use them to light the fire.”

—Adair Lara, columnist, quoting “an 19th century Irish immigrant named O'Reilly,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 30, 1999.

• Editorial Comment: Beats an iPhone in the fireplace.

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Field Hound











Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

Propagating Ignorance

.

The ‘Balance Routine’

“[I]gnorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common idea that there will always be two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion. This was behind how tobacco firms used science to make their products look harmless, and is used today by climate-change deniers to argue against the scientific evidence. 

“This balance routine has allowed the cigarette men, or climate deniers today, to claim that there are two sides to every story, that ‘experts disagree’ — creating a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance.” 

—Robert Proctor, Stanford science historian who coined the term agnotology, “the deliberate propagation of ignorance,” in Georgina Kenyon’s “The man who studies the spread of ignorance,” BBC, 2016. 

• Editorial Comment: On the other hand . . .

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Otter Feet









Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

The New Journalism

.

WhoWhatWhereWhen . . . WHY??

“The original Five W’s can be repurposed to greater effect. For example, instead of asking ‘What happened?,’ a journalist in 2017 might ask, “What kind of God would allow this to happen?,’ ‘What the actual f**k?,’ or ‘What’s the point?’ 

“Similarly, instead of asking, ‘Where did this event take place?,’ you might ask, ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ 

“In lieu of ‘Why did this event take place?,’ try ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?,’ ‘Why do we live in this benighted, fallen world?,’ or simply, ‘Why . . . Why . . . Why?’ 

“These are the questions that people want answered.”

—Luke Burns, writer, “Additions to the Five Journalistic W’s,” The New Yorker, Jan. 31, 2017.

• Editorial Comment: And HOW the heck do we get out of this?

PeezPix by Ted Pease

The Big Tuna












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard

RIP, Si Newhouse

.

Run Free, Editors!

“I am not an editor. I flounder when people ask me, ‘What would you do?’” His philosophy, he said, was to let his editors run free. “We feel almost that whichever way it goes, as long as it doesn’t do something absolutely screwy, you can build a magazine around the direction an editor takes.”

—S.I. Newhouse (1927-2017), magazine mogul, in Jonathan Kandell’s obit, “S.I. Newhouse Jr., Who Turned Condé Nast Into a Magazine Powerhouse, Dies at 89,” The New York Times, Oct. 1, 2017. Chester Higgins/NYT photo, 1985.

• Editorial Comment: “Screwy”? Have you looked around, Si?

PeezPix by Ted Pease

Evening Wisps









Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard