Not NaNo 8 November 8

And so we come to the part of my life when writing suddenly became serious. Up until this point it had never been potential earning material. I loved it. I did it often and even wrote for fun, but  when I applied to study journalism at college it suddenly meant something. I hadn’t ever considered working on newspapers. In fact I didn’t really think about how the words got into the local rag. It’s strange, because I learned to read on newspapers but I never considered that there were writers behind it. I thought it was automatic somehow. Never thought that there were people somewhere hitting keyboards.

A little aside again here about keyboards. These days most people know a keyboard as the black thing (usually black thing) in front of their computer screen. They are flat, and the keys don’t move very much and they certainly don’t bite back when you hit them. Not so back in the day when I was leaning journalism. We had to do typing lessons. Proper secretarial typing lessons. Over and over, asdf, asdf, asdf, semicolon lkj, semicolon lkj. Pages and pages of it. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. That way you’ve typed every letter at least once in a sentence. There were several sentences like that but it’s the only one I can remember. And we had paragraphs to copy type without looking at the keyboard at all. We were expected to know where each letter was by rote, and to use the right finger to type with. I don’t ever use more than about three fingers on each hand now but back then I could actually type properly.

And the vast, heavy machines we had to type on were cumbersome and unwieldy. The keys didn’t just dip slightly when you hit them, they had to depress fully so that the arm with the letter on the end of it was propelled upwards and collided with the paper. You had to load paper in the first place, wrapped around a roller called the platen. You had to keep an eye out as you typed because when you reached the end of a line you had to use your right hand to push the carriage back across the typewriter to align the start of line two. As you pushed the carriage return there was a mechanism the turned the roller just far enough backwards to start the next line.

There was no automatic end of line. You had to estimate how many words would fit before you reached the right margin and stop typing before you ran out of space. All the thoughts you needed to keep going were on top of remembering what to write and how to spell it, of course. There was no such thing as spell check. You had to know. Mistakes could not be rectified without a lot of trouble.

Later models had an eraser band on the ribbon so you could backspace and delete the error then return to type over it. There were also strange pots of thick white paint called Tippex and Snopake that you could use to paint over the mistake then type again on top of it. You could never cover it up completely, of course because the Tippex was never really flat. (You applied it with a mini brush.)
Did I explain the ribbon?  Typewriters worked by hitting the paper with a metal letter shape on the end of a long arm. To make a mark there was a ribbon between the paper and the letter punch, and the ribbon was soaked in ink. This meant that a letter impression was left on the paper. |Then the arm fell back into place. These manual typewriters, as they were called, had a maximum speed, because if you typed too fast you ended up hitting the back of the arm with another letter and consequently typed the ‘front’ letter over and over again. That speed was about 28 words a minute. And that’s a lot slower than a modern day laptop! I was taught to type as part of my journalism studies.

But I’ve got ahead of myself a bit. I have yet to tell you how I got into college to do the NCTJ course in the first place. NCTJ – that’s National Council for the Training of Journalists. They did all the training back then, You could get yourself a job first and do a sandwich course on block release or you could do the pre-entry course like I did. To.get into it I had to do a full application process, including writing an essay about why I wanted to do the course. Obviously I told them all about my history of writing at school, about how I won short story contests when I was very young, but I also said that I wanted to help people and journalism seemed like a good way to do it. I laid it on thick about how the pen is mightier than the sword and that as a journalist I could help the little person beat the power of red tape and achieve great things.

The interviewers called me naive and said I had a very idealistic view of the profession. But I can still remember one of them saying: “But the profession could do with more people like you. We’ll give you a place.” I’ve treasured that comment ever since. It’s good to be told that your character is valuable and that the standards you hold, while innocent, are respected.  It’s been a very long time since then and I’ve not heard the same comment very often.

And so I moved to Sheffield to attend Richmond College and take the NCTJ pre-entry course. The first day they explained that we would be studying shorthand and typing, law – but just enough to understand what goes on in magistrates’ and crown courts – public administration so we could cover local council meetings, and s mysterious subject called journalism. We were also going to have technical lectures in writing skills. They also informed us that we would have homework every day and would be expected to meet strict deadlines. No excuses. Each piece of homework would count towards our final mark at the end of the academic year. Any piece handed in late would not count and would reduce our end of year total mark. Deadlines are important in journalism. and they were determined to teach us that fact early.

They’re called deadlines for a reason. You don’t meet them, your news is dead. Back in my day newspapers came out once a day, or once a week in some places, and if you were going to produce a paper in time for it to be delivered into people’s homes when they expected it you had to work to a pattern. It took a known amount of time to covert the journalists’ words into print and therefore, if you want to get your stuff into that day’s paper you had to finish it on time to get it into the system. And you did want to get into that day’s paper, because otherwise you were old news and you had wasted your day. You were up against local TV and they would certainly cover your story. No-one wants to read about something tomorrow if they saw it on TV tonight. So you worked hard to meet deadlines. Hence the emphasis on it in the early stages of Richmond.

Our first piece of homework sounded simple enough. Go out into the city and gather information to write 150  words about Sheffield.  Sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly challenging when you have to do it. It was a new place for me. I was only just starting to get to know it. I’d moved into my flat just a couple fo days earlier and had spent most of the intervening time settling in to my new home; stocking the pantry, finding out where the local shops were, locating the post office and the bank and which pubs I might be able to use. I knew nothing much about Sheffield itself. Steel, I suppose. I guess I knew it was in Yorkshire. That’s it though. So, after lectures finished I found myself wandering aimlessly around the city centre, as it got increasingly dark, and finding nothing that inspired me. Eventually I found myself sitting in the bus station, cold, lonely and more than a little homesick.

Buses arrived and left and I just sat and watched. Some of the buses showed destinations that I recognised. Distant Yorkshire towns like Leeds; even more distant cities like London and Edinburgh; lots of places I would rather be than Sheffield on a cold, wet evening. Slowly I started to notice another level of buses, the double deckers, rather than the coaches; the local bus service. I didn’t recognise any of those places, but they had strange and exotic sounding names. Abbeydale, Gleadless, Crosspool, Broomhill, Beauchief. (I later found out that one is pronounced Bee Chief) But the ones that caught my imagination were Ringinglow and Swallowsnest. They sounded so much prettier than the concrete desert around me and my depression deepened.

I went back to my flat and wrote 150 words of longing that mentioned all the wonderful place names i’d seen. Convinced I had missed the point and failed at the first fence I went sadly to sleep and handed in my disastrous effort in the morning. Later that day we had our second journalism lecture and our instructor had two pieces of writing in his hands. He read them both to us and asked us to choose our favourite. The first was packed with facts about the city; population, history, significant buildings, local authority structure, everything you could possibly dream of. The second piece was mine.  After reading both our lecturer (Gerry Kreibich – lovely man.) asked us to vote on our favourite. I voted for number one, but surprisingly most of the rest of the group voted for mine. It turned out that the majority had felt exactly the way I had and could relate wholeheartedly to my writing. Gerry pointed out that writing, even for newspapers, isn’t always about facts. Sometimes it’s about feelings. I felt much better after that, at least until a local came up to me after the lesson and
asked if I’d any idea what the places were actually like. “No,” I said, “That’s the point.”

“Don’t go to any of them. You’ll be really disappointed,” she replied.

So that was my first lesson in writing for a living. I realised afterwards that could actually do it. That I was in with a chance of working by doing what I loved. The only bad ting was the price I’d have to pay – grammar lessons!  I’d done them years ago in school, of course, but this was different. I didn’t just have to know how to spell and the difference between nouns, verbs ad adjectives, I actually had to put the rules into practice.