The Creative Process: Somewhere between a dead end and a complete enigma

When I sat down to write this story, I was in complete panic because I was rushed to create what I wanted to be a journalistic masterpiece; something that lived up to my expectations as a writer. As I was anxiously sitting at a computer station on the fifth floor of Alden, relentlessly chugging Mountain Dew and combing through a fat stack of notes and research articles, I realized that I just had to calm down and write the best I could to meet the deadline. However, I knew I was reverting back to one of my main flaws as a novice journalist, the idea that I thought my work would be good enough to let me slide through to the next week without attempting to achieve excellence. I remember telling myself that night, "I don't need to edit much because it looks fine to me," something I am and have always regretted with school assignments.
Aside from my brushes with procrastination, my process is one where I am either stuck for days trying to figure out a spin or lead for a story, followed by hours of painfully piecing together the body, or one in which I can "hammer out" the story in a few hours and spend a brief amount of time editing before I feel satisfied with my work. It is a weird phenomenon which I cannot clearly explain. It is like working on a multitude of different puzzles where in some, the pieces fall together and in others, I have to jam the pieces into their corresponding spots in order to create the illusion of a coherent story. The process is like a (excuse my french) a complete "mind fuck" where sometimes I am chain smoking cigarettes and pulling out my hair to get a story or in other times, the story just flows from my mind to my fingertips and produces a well structured story on the computer monitor. It is just terrible.
But in this particular instance, I decided to calm myself down by putting on my iPod and listen to my favorite album, Hail to the Thief by Radiohead. I know it sounds cliche but I truly think Radiohead is the band of my generation just like the Beatles were for my parents back in the 1960's. Somewhere between "There, There" and "Sail to the Moon", the stars aligned and I thought I had a story. I first formulated my lead by painting the dream of a wedding in Hawaii and juxtaposing that imagery with the reality of a same-sex marriage law being stalled in the Hawaii State Legislature. I then started to write the body relating the story to sentiments about same-sex marriage in Ohio courtesy of the three interviews I conducted with three members of OU's student and faculty body. The process went a lot smoother than I had originally thought, but I still was not happy with the final outcome. So I spent an additional two hours editing the feature so it had a coherent vibe and a distinctive character, but I just felt lost considering I have almost no experience with feature writing. I struggled trying to adapt style tips from other articles and trying to adopt a fairly decent structure in conveying the primary sources' opinions. I felt lost. Plain and simple.
I had written an outline where I wanted to place quotes and touch on sub-topics, but by the end of my slaughter-fueled editing process, the outline seemed pointless to post on the blog because it was so skewed and inverted. I first loved the thought of portraying the story in a linear fashion but then I thought it was too dull and tried to go for a more modular approach. Let's just say I felt like a schizophrenic patient for arguing with myself over the structure for at least 45 minutes, which was a very surprising side effect for even Mountain Dew's high levels of sugar based compounds. But in the end, I had to feel complacent because there was a deadline and I knew better than not to miss it.
I guess all in all, I try to have a process by writing an outline and organizing my notes accordingly, but I don't think the puzzle pieces aligned with me on this assignment. I have learned I feel less anxious when I clear my mind and listen to some chill music, but for me it really all depends on the cards I am dealt out. Like Black Jack or any other card game lining the casinos of Las Vegas , sometimes journalists are dealt out amazing hands full of great primary sources which link directly to other research and sometimes they are dealt mediocre hands, which they have to work with in order to create a decent story by their deadline. I'm not saying that all journalists are pre-destined to have good and bad hands, but that not every time one initiates their writing process, it will be an easy, enjoyable experience.

- Dan