grantland

Writing Lessons: You Are Trying Too Hard

Tom Scocca · 05/22/15 12:05PM

You are a writer. You write features. You are supposed to write a feature about a very famous person at a major sporting event, but the event has not started yet, so you have no new reporting or novel insights on the subject. No one does, and no one can. This is a difficulty, perhaps even a metaphysical difficulty; if you think about it, you can see the whole futility of human experience in this. Indeed, it is possible, when you start looking at it this way, that your material is not thin and generic, but universal—maybe, in having nothing to say, you will find that you have everything to say.