mrs-roboto's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How I Bring Home The Bacon This is the closest you'll ever get to me discussing details of my job. One of my duties as employee of my tiny non profit is to write fluffy human interest pieces about small towns with funny names like Goblers Knob and Sedro Wolley. Often, these are places I've never been and will likely never visit. I do my research online looking at statistics and off line reading various bound appraisal and comparison reports. Occasionally, I make a call and talk to a real person but mostly I make it up as I go along. I justify my lack of actual hands-on experience in that what I am marketing is a good cause, not quite smoke and mirrors (although this entry really struck home). Tonight I was writing about an agricultural hub and it's inhabitants. At heart, I am fiction writer (although it's been some time since I've been published in that manner) and often my need to personalize and draw people in gets a bit out of hand. As I sat down at the computer tonight I reminded myself to remain clinical and not editorialize. Ten minutes into writing my four paragraph review of an affordable housing project geared at farmworkers and their families I realized things had gone horribly awry. I had segwayed into complete and total anarchy. See I had started off like this:
I had then gone on to talk about how people had large families and education was not prized the way it is today, that small children were sent out to the field to work at young ages and that families stayed together and divorce was not as prevalent. Did I mention that this article was supposed to be about a specific housing complex in the year 2003 where the rents are set below the median income so that that immigrant farmworkers could have a safe and clean place to live? How about the fact that the only research I was using came directly from watching too many episodes of Little House on the Prairie? Oh yeah, I was all ready to write in a tornado that ruined the wheat crop and left the family with nothing but horse meat to eat for the whole winter when I recognized that it was time to rein myself in. Highlight, delete, new sentence.
I think that was more what the big boss was looking for, don't you? 9:17 p.m. - 2003-09-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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