An editor's nightmare

What can I say? I have been so wrong on my assumptions. Recently I found that journalism is not so easy, in fact not easy at all. And, I am not saying it after I have been on a really challenging job or anything of that sort. In fact, I have come to the conclusion after my first real journalism assignment. Imagine that, I am already feeling disheartened after my first try and what a try it was. I stood there clueless, trying to get my interviewee to speak and was constantly feeling ill at ease. It was not even I was ill informed about the subject I was writing on. I had gone there with prior research. I had meticulously made the questionnaire. I had followed or at least attempted to follow all the standard practices that one needs to, with all those small talks and breaking the ice with the interviewer and so on. Again, it was not even that the respondents were hard to speak with. They were pretty comfortably offering me the information I was asking for, yet with every words I uttered I could feel my throat choke. What was I doing.? I was asking them all the wrong things and despite the questionnaire at hand, I managed to forget asking some very important details. When I came home and started working on what I had found, I felt lost.

I was at loss of words for the things to write. How do I begin and how do I say what to say?

I figured out all those news stories we read every day and think are so simple are not that simple afterall. Yes, yes, they are just a bundle of 5Ws and H in the inverted pyramid structure. But, believe me, doing that is not simple. The final report? Disastrous.

In the class, I could see my teacher erasing words after words. My report was less a report and more an imitation of a newspaper editorial and that too a poor one. It all seems so easy but it is really difficult to put yourself aside from what you are writing. There is always a bit of temptation to pour in that view of yours, however irrelevant, idiotic or unwanted it is. But even if my views are right and justifiable, it doesn't mean I have the liberty to stick that in, right?Afterall, who am I and why should anyone make the trouble to read what I think? I am perfectly aware that I have no right. Still, words seem to betray me when I am writing.

With my failing, I have started questioning once more am I right in choosing this profession? Do I have what it takes? Now I have more sense to realize it but when I jumped into this field, the only thing I was thinking was, yeah I could write. Somehow I got this weird idea that just because you can write ( a self hold belief in need of serious revision) and were troubled by injustice, corruption, impunity, war and what not, you could be a journalist. Of course, I know it now that it takes more than that. And, possibly I don't have it in me. I don't have the flair, the passion, the ability to communicate and the spark needed to be a journalist. My writing is like an untamed horse. My views even wilder.

As much as I want to, I feel I am incapable of being a journalist. And as much as I don't want to believe it, its turning out to be true. There is always a difference between what people want and what they can be. Sometime back, when a person had suggested this thing to me, even if I did not express at the time, I was fuming with anger. I just could not believe, someone could say that to me. But even if mean, may be his words contained some element of truth. May be the person could see what I was not seeing in myself. May be I don't have it in me.

The only consolation for me is I could still try to cultivate those things in me. I only hope, the desire to do that remains in me. That I don't get tired or frustrated or just drift away from it. That I don't stop believing in myself. That I don't start saying again- I can't be so let me be. Because, after a long time I had finally started saying- I can be so help me be.