My own journey to writing mastery

- While I was at school I was convinced that I was already a brilliant writer. I suppose it's not all that surprising when, as a child, my teachers would often praise my writing ability. I'd hand in an essay, for instance, and the teachers would gush over my dissection of complex ideas or they would wax lyrical about an elegant turn of phrase that I'd happened to write in a short story. Later in college, I think I was seen as one of the better writers in my subject, International Relations, which is an especially writing heavy subject. Now with these sorts of experiences at school and college it was easy to understand how I would've begun to see myself as a pretty decent writer, and it helped as well that I absolutely loved writing. Which is why after graduating, I decided to capitalize on what I believed were my above average writing skills and become a journalist. My plan was one day to write for a major British newspaper such as "The Times" or "The Guardian", or "The Economist", or "Financial Times". However, it didn't take long for me to discover that I was nowhere near as good a writer as I had presumed that I was. My first proper job in journalism was as a reporter on a couple of trade journals, business titles that covered the telecoms industry. I'd write about the latest phones launched in this or that country or some new tariff that a phone company had introduced. Now, on my first day in the job I thought I'd try to really impress my editors by submitting a really well written story. To my surprise, however, my story was returned to me with lots of questions, comments, and most discouraging of all, changes. It turned out that my news editors, while not quibbling with the substance of my article, didn't care too much for my use of formal academic language to tell much of the story. Neither did they appreciate my use of rather elaborate sentences, the type that I'd perfected in college essays, for which I'd usually gotten good grades. As I poured over through the story that I'd submitted during the so-called read back that the editors offered reporters, it seemed to me that my editor had pretty much torn apart what I'd written and then stitched it back together to read completely differently. It was nothing like the way I'd written it. Gone were the fancy and flowery words that I'd proudly inserted. They'd been replaced with plainer, more familiar, sober language. My elaborate sentences which I had thought would display sophistication to our audience of high profile industry executives had been flattened out to forge instead a series of bluntly straightforward points that even a child could understand. Some sentences were clipped to appear less wordy. Others had been stretched to give the writing a completely different pace and rhythm. Several paragraphs had been removed altogether, while others had been exiled to a different part of the story. In short, the article I was reading now was entirely different from the one that I'd proudly submitted just a few hours earlier. Needless to say, this hurt my ego. The radical reworking of my article was a rude awakening for me, but also it was upsetting to my perception of myself as an exceptional writer. In fact, the experience made me doubt whether I was any good of a writer at all. Once I'd gotten over the pain, however, I forced myself to look at the situation objectively and I soon appreciated that my editors were actually making my articles read a whole lot better. And very soon I began to see these experienced news editors of this type as having a rare, hidden talent, and being aware almost of a secret science that most people outside the journalism profession had little or no idea about. Knowledge of this science I thought gave these editors a huge advantage, not only in breaking down the ideas they wanted to express to their audience, but also in communicating those ideas brilliantly. In that moment of realization I decided to make it my mission to figure out how great journalistic writers like those editors did what they did, so that one day I could become an exceptional news writer as well. The lectures in this section are designed to introduce you to the unique mindset of excellent news writers and editors of the sort that I've had the honor to work with and learn from over my two decades long career as a journalist. As we proceed, you'll discover many things about the way they think and the way they operate, the questions that occupy their waking thoughts, the values and aspirations that they hold dear, and the habits and practices that they cultivate. I urge you to study this section closely even though it's more about mindset than it is about tactics. And we'll begin by addressing what I think is the most fundamental question that a good writer asks themselves every time they sit down to write, either consciously or subconsciously. And it's this question, do I really have something worth saying?