Time to admit something

... I have writer's block.

A really, really, really severe case.

I've spent much of the week starting two stories, pulling together a couple of others and putting the finishing touches on our Page 3 centerpiece, which will be running in Monday's IBJ.

And when you write, edit, write, edit, tinker, interview, tinker, refine and keep writing, you hit a wall.

Everyone goes through it. I often tell my students to "start with the middle of the story" and then go back and write the lede. I've done that -- to the point where my story has a smattering of random notes, quotes, orphaned paragraphs and offshoots for where I want to go with this masterpiece.

I've tried to read -- everything from stories from our publication to stories from other publications -- just to try to make it work.


When all is said and done, the story will get done. It'll be printed and it's got enough good material that I hope I can tell the story well.

And that's probably why I'm sitting here with writer's block. Daily journalism, which was my M.O. for years, is a lot of what I call "three sources and the truth" stories. They involve quick stories. Pull together three key sources, report and write. Two of those were previously posted on the blog -- one of them done from start-to-finish in about two hours, which included about 15 phone calls. Both were among the top 10 most-read stories in their respective weeks according to our web data. Those stories are the bread-and-butter of journalism, but a weekly business publication like the IBJ requires more in-depth stories, more sources, more research -- essentially, better journalism.

That's exactly the "spread-your-wings" challenge I was looking for when I arrived here a month ago.

But when you're not quite used to such journalism, you tend to overwrite. You want to make it so perfect, you tend to cram. The drive for perfection leads to ... well, it leads to writer's block. To stories that are fragments of notes. To a lot of frayed ends with an abstract sense of direction. To a lot of sentence fragments that nobody will notice. As I coach others to do, I'll step away, read something else, write a few mid-story paragraphs, look at it with fresh eyes and then eventually pull it together. Writing a blog post certainly helps. Either that, or it will postpone the inevitable :).