How I Write (plus a Plea)

[oakenguy]

18 months ago: Get an idea. Scribble it down. Like it.

17 months ago: Write four good pages over lunch, one on the back of a napkin. Realize I know very little about the script format for this (comic book, for the record). Decide Doing Research Is Important, start getting books from library.

16 months - 3 months ago: Get distracted, occasionally Do More Research.

3 months ago: Read a publisher's profile, get excited. Revise original idea to fit their format. Begin hunting for those good pages I wrote a year ago.

3 months - 1 month ago: Storyboard the comic in very rough, stick figure fashion. Tear the apartment apart three times trying to find those good pages.

1 month ago - 1 day ago: Finally give up the search, start writing. Do pretty well.

1 day ago: Realize there's a lot about the profession of my main characters (tabloid journalists) I don't know about. Start feeling impulse to Do Research; remember what happened 17 months ago.

So, my erudite readers, at least three of whom I know have experience with journalism...anyone know anything about the shady side of the business?

Comments

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Many years ago I heard someone describing a courtoom scene they had--read about? Seen on TV? Heard described by someone else?--in which a tabloid journalist was called upon to explain how a particular story his paper was being sued for had come to be written, in which the journalist apparently stated that essentially there was a central table on which were placed great headlines someone had thought up. As writers finished one story they came and got another headline, took it back to their desk and started writing the new one up. Judge: So there's no actual evidence involved in the stories. Defendent: None whatsoever, your honor. Judge: They're completly fabricated. Defendent: That's correct, your honor.

Possibly an utterly apocryphal story, or one which I'm remembering wrong, or an atypical case. Also, if there's any truth in the anecdote, it may well relate more to "Elvis Sighted in Local Burger King"/"I saw Jesus's face in the sesame seeds of my hamburger bun" type of journalism rather than celebrity-torturing, but I've always remembered the imageof the trial fondly, in any case.

I do know that one favorite trick is to phrase the most outrageous suggestions as questions, since questions cannot actually be considered libel: "Is it possible that George W. Bush has actually been sleeping with Pope John Paul II?" "Will Cher finally admit to being a closet hermaphrodite?"

I've also been told that most such publications have a yearly budget allotted for libel suits, which they consider to be excellent advertising, and only get concerned if it looks like they'll have too many in any given year.

You ask for information, I give you hearsay. What could be more appropriate? :)