A few years ago I was sitting at a table in the front section at a jazz festival eating BBQ with my fingers and writing furiously on a legal pad between sets. I had staked out the table and spread all my stuff out so nobody would try to sit next to me. A guy plopped down, determined to violate my personal space, and asked me if I was writing a note to the band. “I’m a writer,” I blurted out. “I’m doing a review.”  There it was. I said I was a writer. Now I was going to have to write something.

The hardest part of being a writer is that you have to write something. It would be a fun gig if all it involved was going to concerts and taking illegible notes on ticket envelopes and cocktail napkins and then wadding them up in your pockets. Or crawling and kneeling in front of the stage trying to get that perfect photo while the people in the front rows are wondering who the idiot with a camera is who keeps popping in and out of their line of sight. Or getting CDs in the mail and listening to them. But after you stack up that pile of illegible notes or listen to the CD for about the hundredth time you have to face that blank white screen and put words on it. That’s when the nagging inner critic starts to screech that it better be good!  About that time, scrubbing the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush starts to seem like a pleasant alternative.

There are a lot of writer’s manuals that offer wonderful insights on taming that inner critic. Reading them is a great way to put off actually writing something, too. Attending writer’s workshops is an excellent way to meet other writers and get both practical advice and lots of inspiration. And put off writing. Faced with the task of editing down an interview that lasted almost five hours, I took the 30 single-spaced pages to a writer’s conference at a beautiful beachside resort town a few miles north of where I live. Between lively sessions on the creative process, getting published, and marketing your work, I took my unfinished project to an outdoor bar across the street and decisively drew arrows in the margins. 

I didn’t set out to write about music. I played it in bands. I played it on the radio. Like a lot of radio people, I found myself replaced by a computer. Since I wasn’t able to talk about music on the radio anymore, I found myself writing about it. It’s a different world. If you say something stupid on the air, it’s gone the minute you say it. Writing for a website is somewhat forgiving. You can go back and fix any major glitches after the fact. Plus, there is so much information on the Internet that readers tend to skim through and move on. Print, however, is forever. Once it’s published and sold or handed out it can’t be fixed. Sitting at a cafe or concert watching someone sitting near you read what you wrote is unnerving. Watching them wrap the remains of their lunch in it and toss the whole mess in the trash can is downright depressing.

Doing interviews is different, too. Instead of culling quick sound bites from a perfect recording done in a digital studio, it involves transcription… writing down every word both of you said, which is usually 90% “well like you know” and “and-uh.“ Recording at home provides interesting moments, too. Once when I was interviewing someone I had never met (so I was already a tad self-conscious), my cat brought in a dead bird, dropped it in front of me, and then noisily hacked up a wad of feathers. Neighbors doing yard work can drown out entire segments of conversations with their lawn mowers, leaf blowers and chainsaws. Several times there have been lightning storms and power outages. One time I interviewed someone who had just been through an earthquake while we were having a scary, noisy lightning storm.  During the aftermath of a hurricane, I did a late night interview by candlelight. This is not charming. This is a fire hazard. My neighbor’s generator droned and clanked loudly in the background and I kept having to ask the poor guy to repeat himself. Listening back, the whole conversation was peppered with me squawking “What?” like some demented parrot.

Last year after two radio jobs fell through in less than two weeks… one because the guy who hired me got replaced by a computer and the other because the station changed owners and replaced everyone with a computer… I decided that maybe writing was what I was supposed to do, at least for now. It’s something you can do at home in your pajamas while drinking beer and instead of technology being used to replace you it can be used to get the stuff you write out into the world. Plus, it can really turn you into a productive person. Faced with a deadline, I can clean the house, wash and detail the car, weed the garden, do several loads of laundry and sew up another quilt block in rapid succession just to avoid having to face down that blank white screen.

 - Shannon West