This article originally was published on Medium.com in Crow’s Feet on June 6, 2023
Keeping the ball in motion
I’ve been a writer my whole life, and it’s now officially a very long life. As long as I’ve been writing, that designation of “writer” wasn’t especially precise. I mostly wrote because I was forced to by my job, not because I wanted to express the real me. The claim of being a writer makes better sense when you’ve got a specific focus, the thoughts are your own, and you’re free to style it the way you want.
When you’re your own writer, there are monikers that subsume the writing occupation into the kind of writing you do. I’m a novelist. I’m a poet. I’m an essayist. I’m a playwright. I’m a memoirist. Or if you’re writing for someone else, we qualify the term: I’m a technical writer. I’m a screenwriter. I’m a grant writer. I’m a newspaper reporter. Lots and lots of flavors, some admittedly that don’t fall neatly into either of these two broad categories.
When you write in more than one genre, it’s hard to answer to a single label. You can accumulate more badges than a four-star general. If it gets tedious relating how you’ve earned each of those badges, you risk coming across as too much the self-aggrandizing Renaissance artist. To avoid that, you can shed all the badges and announce yourself more succinctly. I’m a writer. The implicatures to this simple declaration include that you’re self-employed and spend your requisite eight hours a day at your quill and paper. You earn your living by writing only or predominantly. You work at your own pace, getting your motivation and inspiration from yourself or, if you have one, your muse.
For all the years that I was working, the writing I did, with one exception, was for the boss. I was told I had to write and, often, what I had to write. There was no muse, unless you count the bosses themselves. And they’re pretty weak tea as muses. It wasn’t until I retired that I began to just write in the unencumbered sense of the word.
Actually, that’s only partly true. I became a columnist for our local weekly newspaper in Jefferson County, West Virginia, The Spirit of Jefferson and Farmer’s Advocate, or more simply, the Spirit. Being a columnist for the paper puts me squarely in the in-between kind of writer camp.
I write a column called Neighborhood Watch, which deals with issues and people in my county. The aim is to tell the good stories about people who might live down the street from you, but you know only to wave at. In Jefferson County, you rarely ignore someone completely, even if you’re not on a social footing with them. You can tell the strangers because they avoid eye contact and certainly don’t wave.
We do have a kind of creeping polarization of the sort that’s infecting other places around the country, fed by toxic politics and widening cultural gaps. It’s not hard to find racist attitudes popping up. For instance, we’re currently having an N-word epidemic in our high schools, a topic that’s made the reporting pages of the paper. The school board, the ACLU, and the NAACP are on alert.
Racism is buried deep into the history of our county and it’s as hard to unroot here as it is everywhere in the country. It’s exacerbated by gentrification and unequal opportunities, making it hard for minorities and young people to afford living here. This results, too often, in these people having to bail out of the area. You lose too many of them and you squeeze out the vital juices nourishing creativity and sparking innovation.
A reporter taking their direction from an assignments editor would report these issues, but voice the negative implications from the mouths of the “experts” they interview, rather than from their own thinking. Reporting is supposed to be different from opinion. It’s facts, with slant of course, but predominantly facts.
The columnist, depending on the editor, has more freedom to be the kind of no-frills, no-nonsense writer I sketched above. Opinion is not off limits. In fact, opinion is critical because it provides the punch for an article. You don’t have to leave it to the reader’s powers of deduction to conclude that a 16-year-old white boy is going to piss off a 16-year-old Black boy by calling him the N-word. You can state it.
You can go further, too, to draw on national statistics to show the violence that results from the insult and how that violence can involve the use of guns. And then go on to conjecture that our gun addiction in this country makes the use of the N-word more frequent. It emboldens 16-year-old boys to think they can handle any shit that might come their way as they practice their budding sense of privilege. You can even use expressions like “gun addiction” that show your particular slant on the issue. Much more freedom of expression than the average reporter is allowed.
The thing, though, about being a columnist, rather than your normal pissed-off, hot-head, letter-to-the-editor writer (yet another designation) is that you have to keep your holier-than-thou attitudes somewhat in check. Your reasoning has to be measured and not too inflammatory. Otherwise, you’ll lose readership, generate hate mail, make people take sides, and the paper will lose subscriptions. So, in a sense, you still are beholden to some overseer, but it’s closer to the Nobel Peace Prize kind of overseer than it is to some Tucker Carlson bully type.
During the spring of 2023, I tried to synthesize my understanding of the columnist role I had taken on. Why was I doing it and how well? I put together a class for the Lifelong Learning Program at Shepherd University, located here in Jefferson County. I called the class Citizen Journalism, a term I didn’t realize at the time already had enough cachet to be accorded a Wikipedia page. The intent of the class was to persuade people to become non-professional (aka unpaid) contributors to all the various media outlets that allow people to give their two cents on issues of concern to them, Medium included.
The rationale for doing something for nothing came from a quote by columnist Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post. She wrote: “Writing is a great way to avoid the loony bin. It’s like a pressure valve. Release those thoughts into the atmosphere and you’re relieved of some burden.” In all honesty, though, since the loony bin is an ever-present reality, like a recurring nightmare, and people are forever being ticked off by something, you have to keep on writing to maintain your equanimity. One comment, one op-ed, one article won’t ever be enough. That’s how I got caught. I had to write a lot of articles for the Spirit before I had the guts to call myself a writer. I think it’s true enough now though.
Since repetition and diligence are called for, I needed to develop some rigor in my thought processing and some discipline in my writing to keep the monkey happily on my back. The organ grinder theory of surviving as a writer.
Still, being relatively new to this writerly life, I’m not a reliable source of how-to knowledge. It seems presumptuous to offer advice. There’s still too much I consider myself unlearned in. And this is where Medium comes in. I’m learning more of what I need to know here.
A particular point that still concerns me, for example, is the question of how important feedback is. Here on Medium, we’ve got several feedback mechanisms: publication acceptances, reads, claps, responses, and highlights, all of which I’m still trying to process into a coherent picture of how well I’m doing. I can’t disentangle popularity from impact. For the present, I’m confident I’m avoiding the looney bin.
For the Spirit, even though we have a comments section for printed articles, I’ve yet to get a single one. No kudos, but no hate mail either. The only thing I can infer as praise comes indirectly from my editor, who has been willing to let me run on well past 500 words. That was the limit he tried to impose on my articles when we negotiated my role. Somewhere between 500 and 750 words is considered some kind of ideal length. But no! I’ve lived too long to know that I can’t get rolling until after 500 words. I usually come in about three times that.
The real feedback comes from those I know or those I write about in the community. They will pat my back and “good job” me when I see them at the farmer’s market or in the bookstore or library, or they’ll send me an occasional email. That’s a big advantage of living in a small town, one that probably Kathleen Parker doesn’t experience too often, if she lives in DC. Then, too, because the Spirit publishes my thumbnail photo for each article, strangers will sometimes recognize me. It doesn’t happen often but stuns me every time it does. Fans? That’s a stretch, I don’t kid myself. But I still take it as kind of an award.
The real reason that I persist has little to do with establishing a reputation or keeping my sanity. It’s because I’ve never had children. It wasn’t a realistic option for a gay man like myself when I was coming out. I would have liked the experience and responsibility of it and had ceaseless encouragement from my mother, who wanted at least one grandchild from each of her five children. She got four out of five, but she always said I’d have made a good father. I think that’s probably true because I do like kids and I find it easy (and fun) to connect with them. They’re interesting people.
The practice I’ve had engaging with kids comes from nieces and nephews mainly, some of whom I’m closer with than others. Some of them have become friends as they’re transitioning now into their own middle-age stages. Some have kids of their own some don’t want kids. It’s those with no kids that I can find most in common with. It’s like we’re bound somehow by the common missing element in our lives. They’re not as distractable as those who are parents and we can have good, meaty conversations.
But there’s a thing about the age difference between the old and those growing old. We older folks can insert (maybe push) ourselves into their lives with sometimes intrusive questions. I’m easy about doing that with my peer group and, of course, get as much as I give. We swap back and forth all the minutiae of our pasts and can click on the common influences we share.
The younger generation seems more hesitant to risk being intrusive. I’ve never had one ask me how I came out when I did or how I balanced my gay life with my work life. I’ve volunteered some of those stories and been affirmed, but it’s nice to feel that people are genuinely curious about who you are because of the questions they ask. I don’t know as I’m heading into my 80’s how many more opportunities I’ll have to answer the questions they don’t ask. But in my writing, I’m trying to anticipate those unasked questions and leave this scramble of stuff for later when they might wish they had asked those questions while I was still alive.
So writing is a cause. I won’t know if they clap or not, but it won’t matter. I shouldn’t be dictating what they choose to be interested in and how they spend their time any more than I want someone to do that to me.