Born to Die

I spent the day sitting at my desk, snowed under piles of transcripts, documents of all sorts and various papers scattered all around me. Markings and scribblings, attempts at sifting through the whole mess, trying hard to put some order to that mountain of information so my mind could finally synthesise the whole to spit out a version of some summary. That would be me attempting to write a descent feature.

Have you ever tried your hand at writing a feature? Back at university, I used to think I was rubbish at feature writing, mainly because I could never find anything to write about. My tutor would invariably say: "Find something to write about that no one else has thought of. It could be on a topic that everyone has been writing about, you just need to find a unique angle."

A good feature has you reading it from start to finish without once wondering how hard it must have been to write the whole thing - or how many days and hours were needed, how much information had to be taken in by the writer and then synthesised in such a way that it would allow for an enticing retelling of the story. As readers, we only feel the enticement to read the piece, and the better the piece flows, the less we are aware of just how much work and effort went into the few pages we're reading.

Good writing doesn't just require good writing skills. Oh no. It seems to require excellent memory as well as the capacity to not just take in information but sift through it to only retain the gems to be found in the deluge. And that's what feature writing has taught me about my own self, that I have that capacity to sift through a rather inhuman amount of information.

I love journalism, and I'm not sure why. It is everything that I am not in more ways than one. I remember being at my worse in my early 20s, deep in depression with only a desire to die. I had no interest in life, I had no goals left to achieve - nothing. Then I found this job in a cinema, where I got to watch movies for free. For some reason people in that place happened to be really nice and friendly, and for the first time, I seemed to fit in with a bunch of random people from all over the world.

I remember watching Blood Diamond, followed by the latest Superman movie, and suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. As cliché or insane as that may sound, the sole reason I decided to get into journalism was after watching these two movies. Yet that profession was nothing like me except for the writing element. I was shy and awkward with people, I had no self confidence left whatsoever, and I was about as competitive as an infant. But I remember something within me pushing me to go for it regardless... something within was telling me that it was exactly what I needed to build a bridge between the dream world I had immersed myself in from a young age and Reality. It was going to be tough, I could feel it from the start... because I knew I was about to go down a road that was opposite to my pre-dispositions.

But as I sit lost under a pile of transcripts and documents, and as I wonder who the hell 'I' is endlessly, I know at least one thing: I made the right choice then. No matter how opposite the job was to my person, it helped beyond words. It helped bridge a chasm between my own ivory tower and Reality - the world.

And as I was struggling away writing that darn feature, I remembered that we're all born to die anyway. How funny that we keep forgetting that especially when we keep ourselves busy. We're always so focused on reading a story from start to finish that we forget that it's the making of the story that matters.