Writing Past Deadline

Dear Rob — When you describe the pressure of coming up with script revisions on these short deadlines it reminds me of writing a term paper in a day and a half. What acute misery. And of my first reporting days. Basically teaching myself journalism while the clock was ticking. You get to wanting a miracle. A different life. You understand a little how some people choose suicide over this. When deadline’s past and you’ve done it again — what relief. You feel so good that if you’d been coming down with a cold, the cold wouldn’t stand a chance now.

You’ve had so many of these short deadlines lately...are you miserable? And not just deadlines, but creative ones. If a shoemaker is told he has to make twice his usual number of shoes today, he knows if that’s possible or not. When the product is creative, you don’t know if you’ll get even one shoe made.

Am sure it’ll get easier the longer you’re in this line of work.

Now I’m recalling those newspaper deadlines at the Washington Missourian. Mind if I set a few memories down?

The other reporters would be walking past my desk with one story after another — taking their typed pages to the typesetter. Meanwhile I’d be sitting at my typewriter with my hands frozen in the air over the keys, Like a dummy in a museum diorama: “Journalistic Man.” I’d be putting together a lead sentence in my head. I’d finally have it and — spakka spakka spakka — type it up with savage speed. Making up for lost time. It’s how those encephalitis patients in Awakenings must’ve felt when the dopamine briefly kicked in.

I’d go through this a number of times, starting over with a fresh page each time, before I’d finally get a first paragraph that worked. Then the rest of the story would flow pretty quickly. But I might have four or five of these stories to get written by 2 in the afternoon. Two would come and the rest of the reporters would be out in the pasteup area, putting their stories physically into place, laughing, the hard part of the news cycle behind them. And I’d still be frozen at my typewriter trying to divine my final lead paragraph, with the whole story still to write after that. My editor, Bill Miller, also owner of the newspaper, would come through carrying his own last pages to the typesetter and see me sitting there. “Come on, Tom, it’s 2 o’clock,” he’d say with a kind of amusement. Forty five minutes later he’d stick his head in from the pasteup room. “Come on, Tom! They’ve started the press.” No kind of amusement, this time. Probably by then I’d be past the lead and typing like a fiend. I’d whip the story out of the typewriter, do a quick pass of penned corrections, then dash away, dropping it off at the proofreading desk on my way to my three to five blank boards. The others would be done or finishing up, already. Relaxed and slow moving. For them the work day was almost done. I’d still have 30-60 minutes of pasteup to do, headlines to write and re-write — still a heck of a puzzle to put together — and I was late before I even started. I could feel the floor rumbling from the big press in the basement. I knew there’d be shit to eat with the press guys for making them wait again. My head was still whirling and now my body was, too — picking up a t-square here, a cutting blade there, tripping over a wrinkle in the carpet — but using that as an excuse to run — picking up a few extra seconds. Must’ve looked like a machete dancer. Typesetting girls jumping out of my path. I was moving fast, but my mind was moving faster — I was calculating all my moves in advance, except for the tripping. Had to. Had to be both calm and fast at the same time. Had to shave off seconds in the physical world where I could, but couldn’t let myself disintegrate into frenzy. Had to think and act at hot rod speed, but had to be a calm driver at the wheel.