on why I’m doomed to fail as a journalist

Today’s post was supposed to be about finishing off the one I canned last night. It was supposed to be a fresh attempt at writing all those clever things I’d noticed at Tuesday’s book launch… a touching portrait of a poet with one leg nervously reading his poetry before a crowd of his peers… his boyish embarrassment at the compliments received… the fragility of the artist… the fact that his mum was the only one in the room that read along with him, silently… that she was the only one that really understood the references to his childhood, and therefore smiled when no one else did.

There was even going to be pathos…

But something worrying happened, so you’ll have to fill in the gaps yourself…

Within five minutes of abandoning “on going to a(nother) book launch” and leaving room1004, I came across a blaze. The laundrette facing The Swan was in the process of self-destructing, the apparent result of tins of paint being stored above an extraction or heating vent.

As I walked past, three fire brigades, an ambulance and a number of gardai arrived. The apartments above the laundrette were being quickly evacuated. Traffic ground to a halt and a crowd began to gather.

I joined them.

Having abandoned my resolution to not smoke, I lit a cigarette and stood there idly watching… The amount of smoke created when a room full of clothes takes light soon made it clear that this was an ill-considered decision…

I persevered…

What I didn’t do though, was act like a journalist. I didn’t ask any questions, I didn’t take notes, I didn’t even hang around to see if there were injuries.

I went in to The Swan and ordered a pint.

A journalist would have returned to room1004, fired off three or four hundred words and had it e-mailed to The Metro and Herald AM before the DFB had re-rolled their hoses.

So what’s wrong with me? There’s certainly an element of shyness here… and the firemen did seem busy…

But more significantly, I think I’ve realised that I’d rather work in a laundrette than file a story about one burning down.

It’s just not the kind of thing that gets me going.

I could have written it, easily, and maybe it would have been printed. I could have asked the woman beside me taking photos on her digital camera to e-mail them to me that night, just to add punch to whatever I ended up writing.

At the very least it would have been a learning experience…

But instead I acted like everyone else on that street, and merely looked on with fading interest every time I went out for another cigarette.

Sometimes I feel there are a lot of articles being printed that don’t really add up to anything more than the words on the page. “Laundrette on Aungier Street burns to ground – paint storage blamed”… and yet the world still turns…

I don’t think that’s the kind of article I had in mind when I signed up for this. I also didn’t expect to be told that if I learn to write a clever headline and keep my sentences short and simple, I’ll be operating more or less at the top of my field.

Journalism, surely, is more vital than that.

Writing is a skill, and it shouldn’t be squandered compressing the trivialities of daily life in to something that can be read, digested and forgotten in the course of a bus journey.

So maybe – despite all my reservations in the last post – what I’d really like to be when I grow up is the guy behind the desk signing copies of his new novel or collection of poetry, all the while being slapped on the back by sycophantic bullshitters whose last novel I just loved.

Or maybe I’ll work in a laundrette.