Before the big THR story was published last week, I was pretty nervous.
There were multiple reasons for that, I told myself; the subject was big — perhaps too big for the word count we’d been given, but print is print and you only have the space allotted you. (When I was starting out as a writer, I’d look at magazine pieces that stretched through multiple pages with awe and fear, thinking I could never write anything that long; I now know quite how short a two page magazine story actually is.)
More than that, the subject was important. The story we were writing was about something that had changed people’s lives, had ruined lives. (It had certainly ruined careers, or utterly derailed others’.) Each of the three of us who’d written the story had talked to a number of people impacted by what had happened, and we felt a responsibility to get everything right for them, if nothing else.
There was also the fact that, by the time it ran, we’d been working on this for some time — more than a month, in some form or other. We’d started seriously talking about it towards the end of June, and even that came after watching events unfold for a couple weeks by that point. The story had been something that we’d been living with for awhile, first as an abstract concept, then as information gathering, then finally more than a week actually putting together and pulling apart, going through the editorial process. The idea of putting it out, of it actually not being something in the works anymore, felt oddly daunting.
And finally, I was nervous about reception to the piece. Would it go over well? Would people be receptive? Reporting it had only uncovered more stories to tell, and I’d already pitched follow-ups. If we were judged to have done this one well, it would be easier to convince editors to go for what’s next.
I’d convinced myself that I was the only one nervous, but as the piece actually went out, I discovered that wasn’t the case; someone else who worked on it shared their own relief as reaction started to appear, and it was positive. It was an oddly restorative moment, for reasons I’m unsure about, but something that made me feel less ridiculous and less alone.