(A potted history and various thoughts...)
People have, of late, been asking me the question of how my background in journalism may influence my writing in other forms. It's an interesting proposition ... mainly because it's something that I have long simply "felt" rather than consciously been aware of. But thinking about it, I do believe that naturally that stuff has influenced my writing largely because it has heavily influenced my life. I believe the best writing comes from the writer being engaged with the world and their surroundings; the skills of observance and engagement therefore that are used in journalism are equally important for other forms...
Ok, a potted history and some thoughts ... I have worked as a journalist for the past 19 or so years, in Australia and the UK.
I started out in that area at News Ltd newspapers here in Sydney, getting a job as a copyboy in the newsroom shortly after I left school and was hit with the realisation that writing was, then, the only thing I was remotely interested in doing (apart from surfing!)
A year after that, 1987 I think, I got a cadetship on the old Daily Mirror newspaper and basically what followed was several years of working as a reporter, covering everything from court reporting, to State Parliament, to music writing, to police reporting, where I covered innumerable murders, accidents and cases such as the backpacker killings.
It was somewhere among all that that I began writing my own observations of these and other events happening in my life in the form of what I would eventually call "poetry". In some senses, writing that stuff was a real relief from the daily grind of reporting and the associated stress of "churning out" news copy. I found it gave me a much more fulfilling form of expression and, as time passed, it became a fair bit more than that for me…
It became almost a way for me to deal with the worlds I was seeing, a way for me to personally document my days unfettered by sub-editors or the concerns of the mass of suburban readers. I was also starting to dabble in the idea of writing fiction – a novel – but what I called "poems" at that point were a much easier and faster way of capturing the essence of things.
As time went on, this urge to capture things in that manner just naturally grew and I began to really start to concentrate on that area and began to really look at it as a valid form of expressing myself. I just sort of forged my own path with it, not really following too closely what others were writing … my idea was to not really be bound by convention or what other people thought.
But, in the context of this topic, I guess, I never really saw this stuff as being THAT different from reporting, anyway … and, for me, it still isn't.
In fact, I probably feel that more strongly now than ever … that poetry can be a valid form of expressing, or portraying, if you like, real situations, almost as a form of reportage.
Of course there can perhaps be a more impressionistic edge to "poetry" than more conventional forms of "non-fiction", but I do believe that poetry can be essentially "true"; that it can spring from real life and talk about real events, whether purely personal events or events of the wider world.
I guess a point I want to make is that I personally believe most good writing springs from an engagement with the world, from the writer's ability to observe their life and surroundings. And taking that a step further, I feel a lot of good writing, whether it be journalism, fiction, poetry or ... whatever... comes from processing those clear things that are observed into the written word.
I'm not saying that all journalists can write poetry or all fiction writers can write journalism, or whatever ... my point simply is that the channel that allows someone to shape their words into a coherent form – any form – on paper is, I believe, essentially the same … although the final form can often be vastly different.
Looking specifically at my own writing, what I've always tried to do is be as clear and concrete as possible – naming names, as it were – while at the same time not limiting myself to NOT attempting to capture an image in an unusual way or say something in a way that is interesting.
On a more "technical" level, I look for rhythm and feel over pure poetry structure or form. In a sense I could easily be regarded as a messy poet, a devotee of doggerel, but quite simply, I don't care … I try to present my experience of the world, and hopefully …. hopefully … people enjoy that!
That is all for now.
