Reading Time: 5 minutes
I wrote my first editor’s note for AALL Spectrum. It was a lot harder than I expected. As you will know if you follow this blog, it was not due to writing publicly. I’ve been reflecting on the differences and, frankly, I’m not sure that future columns will be any easier even as the process becomes more familiar.
My writing path is a convoluted one. I think that, if anyone had attempted to guess what high school me would be doing in mid-career, writing was unlikely to make that list. And yet. The thing that comes back to me over and over is all of the newsletters and publications I was involved in.
I went off for a year in England to study at a law school there during my undergrad. I had known for a long time that I wanted to go to law school, to be a lawyer, even if it is now, in hindsight, clear that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I lived in the dorms (halls) there on a hall with a bunch of English lads. The women were one floor up in our building and we were all in what was known as the U Block. Back then the name struck me as funny; it was a lot more institutionalized than I had experienced at the University of Iowa. Over time, early term pub crawls turned into a lasting group of US and UK friends, some of whom I remain close to. When I got back to the States, I reached out to all the other returnees and our continuing Sheffield-ites and put out a periodic newsletter for U Block folks, penning most of the content myself.
When I arrived at law school, I started a regular newspaper on my own hook, inviting colleagues to contribute, adding an article of my own, and then publishing it. Totally unsanctioned but still fun. I think a lot of law schools have that sort of thing. The world wide web emerged and so I created an also-unauthorized website with law school contact information and the like. A few years later, I picked up this domain name and started to post my own content.
I never really had an intention to blog. If anything, I stumbled into blogging when trying to understand content management systems better. I had started working at large organizations like the American Bar Association and exploring the options beyond Microsoft’s FrontPage and Adobe’s Dreamweaver (Macromedia as was). If anything, my interesting in writing was sporadic and entirely for other people. Those publications and my contributions are, in many cases, long gone.
Content management was an interesting world, though. It was a natural progression to think about how to move hand coded web pages into templates and use databases to serve them up. This led me to Zope, a CMS product that was open source but also was something I could install and run myself. It was the first modular system I’d used and one of those modules was for blogging.
My first posts were less about content and more about trying to figure out how it worked. Sure, the title and the content were easy. What about tagging? How to organize in a taxonomy? Of course, Zope was a door being kicked open. Then came Plone, which I ran for awhile before landing on WordPress, which I finally switched to for myself in March 2011.
I’ll skip over the intervening time. My posts still meandered across a variety of content and, to a certain extent, still do. Eventually I landed on writing about work and my other experiments. It was safer than talking too much about myself and I was already becoming careful about opening up about myself and my family online.
This was the big change for me. I think that, once you find a type of writing that you are comfortable expressing or communicating, you can fall into some positive habits. Increasingly, I have adopted a pattern of writing as often as I can. I can’t manage something like Blaugust but I try to aim for a weekly post. Sometimes I find myself writing a couple posts all at once, clearing my head of ideas or thoughts that are cluttering up my mind.
At some point, I started to get a real mental health bump out of posting to the blog. Some posts would generate an email from a colleague or even a publicly posted comment. I tend to get more direct emails than comments, which is fine as I’m not sure my writing style is one that provokes discussion so much (although, occasionally, it clearly prompts revulsion!).
There are rough edges to the blog. I often write in a single draft, scheduling it for a future date, then making minor edits as I reflect on the post. In a very few cases, I’ve deleted the post or wholly rewritten it. It is funny how often I can feel in my gut, instinctively, that the writing is either something I don’t want to share or isn’t communicating the idea that I had. I am confident there are typos—eat that, AI—that even my mum doesn’t catch and point out.
Blogging is a genre, though, and the voice that I have here is not necessarily my inside voice. I write differently at work, both in emails and differently again in memos or more permanent publications. When I taught bar essay writing, that was another genre and it took me awhile to feel comfortable about the differences. In the same way that the students had to learn to write differently, I had to look at their writing in a more critical way than I typically apply to my own or others writing.
Instinctively, I knew then that my first editor’s note was going to be something different. I had not anticipated how different though. I did some preparatory reading of the articles that are in the issue, made some notes, and then fired up Microsoft Word to a new, blank document.
It sat there, staring back at me. Literally no words would come to mind as I stared at the screen. It is not uncommon for me to have writer’s block. It’s one reason I usually travel without looking at my phone or tablet. I may listen to music but I always zone out and, whether walking or on the train, I often find my mind wander towards something I’m writing.
This is the same even with longer writing projects. I was really struggling getting my book manuscript even started back in May. It was like trying to figure out where to start eating a cooked mammoth. One day, my mind lit on a couple of words and put them into a couple of sentences and, when those hit the page, I was off and running. Usually I need a turn of phrase or some other hook that will anchor me to the writing.
In this case, the document kept staring at me. I had had a an interaction earlier in the day that had unsettled me and I couldn’t stop it interrupting. Each time I thought I’d found my hook, I was replaying the interaction. Finally, I just started writing to get something on the page.
Very much unlike any of my blog posts, I wrote a bit and then recrafted it. Then a bit more, and then a bit of editing. I am not sure if it’s because I know that the audience is not just larger than this blog’s audience but also that’s there’s an institutional quality to it. I’m not really writing as myself any longer. I mean, I’ll be bringing a voice to the work but my shoulders will be wearing a cloak that has been loaned to me.
It was also a bit of a challenge to have a word count. I don’t really have an upper limit on my blog posts, which is my most regular writing experience. At work, I try to keep things succinct but no one is counting words. I seem to average about 1,900 words, which is a healthy length for an AALL Spectrum feature and 4x too long for a column. Not that I would want to insert myself that significantly into the magazine. I’m just there to help other voices be heard. Just a dab will do you.
To paraphrase Tom Hulce as Mozart, there are just as many notes as I require.
In the end, I spent a lot more time word-smithing and polishing those 450 words (I was under my word limit!) than I probably have anything other than a cover letter to go with a job application. It was an interesting challenge and one that, as I mentioned at the start, I doubt will go away. At the same time, I used similar tactics—for example, I wrote it in advance and then let it ferment for a day or so to make sure I felt the same about it later—as I do here and that overlap in process will probably help.
I am looking forward to seeing what new techniques I pick up as this goes along. I am already very cautious about word choice in my blogging and I expect it will be even more so with the editor’s column. While I don’t have content constraints, there is a perimeter that you want to stay within and it will be interesting to explore that space. I think that columns will come together more quickly in the future but will still require more thought than I would put into a lot of other writing.
All in all, I’m glad to get the first one out of the way. I think that the first step of any new effort is often the hardest. I’m looking forward to this next stretch of what is becoming a very long path.