Back in the past I used to be able to write at work because my employers frankly didn;t care what I was doing most of the day. I should have left that job earlier but somehow there was always a reason to give it a few more months. I was convinced that things would get better if I just hung in there. Never did, of course, and eventually it became so awful that I gave up altogether and took voluntary redundancy.
Here I go again, muttering about things that really aren’t relevant to this narrative. I’m supposed to be writing about my writing. I suppose that telling whoever reads this that I’m writing in brief stints whenever I can is about my writing isn’t it? I could actually do a whole section on where I’ve written in the past. After all, I’e had a long enough history of this writing thing to have a variety of interesting places and methods.
Does it count as writing if you don’t actually have a pen in your hand or a keyboard at your fingertips? Back in the old days of journalism before the world went electronic we sometimes had to phone in copy. When we were close to deadlines and didn’t have time to get things back to the office we ad to find a phone. Remember those days when we didn’t all have phones in our pockets? We used to have to watch out for the big red boxes on street corners and we had to make sure we carried enough change that we could make a call. Lots of 10p pieces rattling round in our purses . When we were out in the field we had to gather the information then call up a copy taker in the head office and dictate the story down the phone line.
Sometimes it was so tight that we didn’t even have time to write anything in our notebooks. We just told the tale off the top of our heads. It wasn’t easy, but we could all do it. You have to come up with a sentence before you write it down. You might think you’re composing as you go along but you usually know what you’re going to say. Might not be obvious. Anyway, we had to dictate our story down the line and someone at the other end would type very quickly to put it all on paper so it could go through the print system.
You had to remember to give full instructions. Let the copytaker know when you wanted a capital letter. You ended a sentence with stop. stop. all punctuation all difficult spellings had to be explained carefully to make sure the story was what you intended when it finally saw light of day in the papers. Of course you knew that everything you did was eventually destined to become chip wrappers and fire lighters, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a sense of pride!
This is fascinating.
ReplyDeleteI well remember when all phones were landlines and you had to find a telephone box and make sure you had enough change. I never worked as a journalist so I never had the strain of phoning copy in!