Yes, sometimes journalism can still be fun

I took my first helicopter ride today. A commercial real estate developer flew me over the company's latest major project, an intermodal site in one of Chicago's suburbs. And, I can't lie, it was pretty neat.

I've flown in airplanes, of course, but taking off in a helicopter just has a different feeling. For one thing, you're surrounded by a lot of glass. You really feel the air rushing past you and the ground slipping away. I mean, when you're in an airplane you can imagine that you're merely in a really noisy house or apartment, long as you don't look out the window. In a helicopter? No way.

I even got to wear one of those cool headsets.

This is all just a reminder that sometimes working as a writer can still be fun. Yeah, I had to take notes during the flight. But I also spent much of it enjoying the view. That's not so bad.

Some Thoreau thoughts

Last night I went to see a play, "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail." My wife designed the costumes for the play -- yes, both she and I work in "creative" fields. Woe to our bank account! -- and I wanted to get a look at them before the play closed. They looked great, of course. They always do.

The play, though, got me thinking about what we all do for a living. Why did you get into writing? Did you want to make a difference? Did you want to make people think? Did you want to entertain people, make them smile or cry or shout?

I know that's what motivated me to write. But I've lost sight of this as I scramble to make enough money to pay the bills in this dismal national economy.

"The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail" details the long evening when Henry David Thoreau, the famed writer, poet and, of course, tax resister, spent in jail for not paying his taxes. What struck me was Thoreau's conviction to make a difference, to have an impact on his world. It's what inspired him to leave behind his idyllic life at Walden Pond and re-enter the human race.

Now, I'm certainly no Henry David Thoreau, and my house is no Walden Pond. But as I've concentrated on pounding out the content stories, and the regular paychecks they produce, I've left behind much of the writing that inspired me, and, I hope, the people who read them. So, I'm making this resolution: I will continue to churn out meaningless content stories to keep my bank account full enough. But I won't forget to write the stories, too, that represent real journalism, the stories that require me to actually talk to people who have something important to say.

Earlier this month, I wrote a story about grooms who are doing just as much to plan their weddings as are their future brides. This isn't earth-shattering stuff. But it means something. Someone might read that story, maybe a groom who isn't pulling his weight on the wedding planning, and make a change. Maybe that lazy groom will order the wedding invitations so that his stressed bride-to-be doesn't have to. Whatever, a story can make a difference, even a small one.

A content story? Not really. Remember that: Content is for money, purely. Real stories, they're for money, too, of course, but they're for something else, too.

Be careful: Content writing encourages bad prose

We all know that content writing isn't exactly art. The goal is to write as many stories as quickly as possible. The pay just isn't high enough to justify artfully written pieces.

(Some content writers might disagree. But let's be honest: The stuff we're writing isn't meant to be read. It's meant to get people to specific Web sites. If we write pure gibberish, but it brings in the traffic, we've done our jobs.)

Writers just have to be careful that they don't take their bad content-writing habits with them when they're working on legitimate magazine or newspaper writing.

When writing content stories, the goal is to get to that required word count. That leads writers to produce sentences that are far longer than they need to be. Here's an example from my own work, a content piece about shopping for big screen TVs: "Shopping for the right big screen TV can prove to be a challenging task."

Now, that sentence isn't great. But it has a good amount of words in it. That's all I wanted. If I was writing that same thought for a real magazine, though, it'd go something like "Shopping for big-screen TVs can be challenging."

The first sentence has 14 words. The second has eight. The second is also a better sentence: It gets to the point quickly. That's what we're supposed to do in journalism.

But content writing, of course, is not journalism. It's filling space. Just remember to change your approach when you're writing anything else.