Guidance on the lonely road of writing

EDITOR'S NOTE: Six mid-career freelance journalists who specialize in science and environmental stories offered takeaways from a weeklong workshop on nonfiction writing held at a guest ranch in Tucson, Arizona. One thing we journalists tend to forget: There’s safety in numbers. With time, we get good enough to get the job done, but maybe not as great as we dreamed we would be one day. We feel mostly alone in this journey. We have colleagues, bosses, rivals, friends and that jerk who always gets the story just ahead of us. But the road to the Big Story, the Great Story, feels like one we walk alone. What I learned from a weeklong narrative nonfiction workshop is that we’re all on that path together. We stumble in the same ways, dawdle in the same ways, get lost and rediscover ourselves in ways that, while not identical, are so similar as to point to something beyond a personal failure. That’s true of the bowel-tightening, headache-inducing, existential terrors of the job as well as the pettiest bad habits and oversights. One journalist at the workshop said she’d lost the joy. Gulp. Another had beautiful ideas but stalled on execution. Guilty. Slathering every sentence with tedious introductory dependent clauses? Me. Getting lost in the fog between reporting and focusing a story? Uh-huh. But this week those admissions came with a surge of liberation. It was a happy jolt to realize that your bad habits and flaws and soft spots, your frustrations and stumbling blocks, are not your unique failings; they're occupational hazards. These are professional failings, just like a runner gets an Achilles glitch after years of training, or a baseball player gets the yips. It comes with the territory. They are things we all wrestle with as professionals, the result of trying to solve the same problems in similar ways. But if the same challenges afflict many of us, the same solutions can help us make it to that Big Story. Below are just a few of the things my fellow word-travelers are taking away from the week.