A Quote by Tom Rachman
Basically, financial reporting is this sinking hole at the centre of journalism. You start by swimming around it until finally, reluctantly, you can't fight the pull anymore and you get sucked down the drain into the biz pages.
Related Quotes
Typically there are little fragments of specific words and images swimming around in my mind, and then at some point, I'll sit down with the guitar and everything will fall into place. It's like your brain is a drain with a bunch of words and images dropping into it, swirling around. The drain is stopped up, but you can feel these things dropping into it. Then at some point, someone comes along and pulls the plug out of the drain and everything comes together in the song.
Every empire has to get sucked down the drain. As a British person, I know how it feels.
I finally get to the place where the book has matured in my mind and I can hardly wait to start writing it. Then I just sit down and I start. I hit the go button. I have an outline, which is 70 pages, but I don't look at it. I never have to look at it.
I remember a story I once heard about drowning: that when you fall into cold water it's not that you drown right away but that the cold disorients you and makes you think that down is up and up is down, so you may be swimming, swimming, swimming for your life in the wrong direction, all the way toward the bottom until you sink. That's how I feel, as though everything has been turned around.
Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.
I don't think journalism changes. It's about digging into stories and telling them well. The basic tenets of great reporting stay the same while things around it change. Technology has made reporting easier, but it has also caused job loss. Social media has increased discussion around topics, but it has its own challenges at times.
My biggest challenge was when I had my first panic attack at 27. It's not something you can ignore, you can't sit around and get sucked into a rabbit hole.
I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.
Journalism today is obviously in a major transition. Going to journalism school, learning how to write, working your way up in a little paper in Decatur, Georgia and then moving to Atlanta and then maybe to New York: it's just over. You have to have a whole other set of skills now. You have to be a videographer, you have to do social media. You can't do a long, thoughtful, insightful piece if you don't have the time to do reporting, particularly reporting around somebody who doesn't want to be known or an issue that doesn't want to reveal itself.
Candidates have been telling you that if elected they would 'pull you from this bog hole of financial misery.' Now is a good chance to get even with 'em, by electing 'em, just to prove what a liar they are.
People get sucked into being so show-bizy. I mean this is show biz, but I just can't do anything that's not in my DNA.
My real first job was delivering newspapers with I was 15. I would ride my bike around and chuck papers at people's houses. The thing that sucked is when I would go collecting everyone acted like they were not home. Totally sucked but because I could control the weather I showered trashcan size hail down on their homes until they were completely decimated.
Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day, until you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again.
And I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking.
I love swimming, swimming's my passion and I hope I swim until the last day of my life, so I really, really do enjoy swimming, but swimming for me is simply a way of carrying a message.
A lot of people involved with celebrity journalism have interesting ideas about the people they want to write about going into the interview. Then as soon as they actually sit down with that person, they basically ask the questions they think journalists are supposed to ask, and they start viewing themselves almost as a peer of the subject. Like they're going to become friends. That's why most celebrity journalism is so terrible.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist