I am currently doing an internship for Chicago Public Radio, and all in all, I love it. I was excited to start although I did have some reservations since most of my experience was in print, but it turns out that I love working here even more than I thought I would. My problem is that I was originally hired under the condition that I would be here for six months. Now, two months in, I have been told by our human resources manager that whether or not I will be "invited" to stay the whole six months depends, more than anything else mentioned, on my ability to turn around stories faster. I really want to stay but I'm not sure I'll be invited to.
Pounding out stories quickly has always sort of tough for me. Almost all of my previous stories were written for my college paper or a small community paper, both of which only ran weekly and therefore had week-long deadlines. As a result, making the transition to a large metro station's deadlines hasn't been easy.
Here, I'm assigned a story around 9 and expected to be ready for editing by 1 or 2, and that's only supposed to be my first of 2-3 cut n' copies stories for the day. Regularly writing anything less than that is pretty much unacceptable, and I sometimes find myself only writing 1, maybe 2 stories for the day. I know that I'm 100% capable of doing 3+ stories daily, I just can't seem to consistently do it.
At first I struggled with the new "talky" format of radio, but now that I understand that, I just don't have any excuses. I admit that sometimes when I get edited, I tend to sulk and slow up pace instead of jumping on top of the phone to confirm a fact or run with a new, revised angle... Editing face-to-face is new to me.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to become a quicker writer? Exercises, states-of-mind... anything at all to help out? I feel like I have some mental hurdle that I just can't get over.
Sorry for such a disjointed post but I'm at work and on deadline! ;)
Responses:
From Jason Marsteller on August 9, 2007 at 5:23 PM
I had the same problem when I first started writing about 10 years ago. What made it easier for me is when I figured out that different types of stories have different sorts of flows.That gave me the chance to develop "formulas" for different types of stories.
For instance, when I wrote about volleyball at one time, I wrote the standard lead of such and such beat such and such by #-# at location on such and such a date. Simple lead.
Then, my next paragraph would address any career or season milestones. If there wasn't anything pertinent, that paragraph then became overall stat talk. Like so and so had a double-double with 10 blocks and 10 kills.
After that, I broke down each individual game within a match, which could be up to five games.
I could usually write all of this strictly from a box score following a match. That's about 7-9 strong paragraphs.
If you are stuck in a spot where you have to bang out story after story, just figure out a formula that works (and that your editors like), and stick to it.