I never wanted to be an author. I was a information designer. Being a columnist like a lot of things in my career, was a bit folk.
When I finish this column, I want to share the strange style of the beginning.
After several years as a graphics editor in the Times’ newsroom, and later the graphics director, then a short term in the National Geographic, I returned to the Times: I met the Executive Editor for Lunch. He agreed to return to the paper. I told him that I would like to prepare a chart for feedback.
When I met Andy Roshanthl, then the editorial page editor and head of Roy, he suggested that I write an introduction of 400 words for the chart, though I was not the author. The title I suggested, the title of the OP chartist, very complex, and told me that I would be called only columnist.
My heart started running. When I got out of the building, I tied my back to prevent it from breaking my back. I was doing hyper ventilating.
Not only was I given a bigger title than my wishes, at that moment I also went from becoming a private citizen, which I liked and thought that I would be living for the rest of my life, being a public personality.
It was complicated to me. I was an Abelangi man who always assumed that I just needed to make revelations with those with whom I was involved. The idea was abolished.
I knew from life in a news that if you told your story, it belongs to you, to some extent, but if others exposed your story, it became their They have no responsibility to be grateful. You are telling it.
Accepting this work, I was pledging to come out.
From the beginning, many readers did not think the way I was doing was imagined: as a chartable feature with a short written interview. Instead, he often asked: Why is this column so small – too short to make his arguments – and why is it being picked up by the chart so much?
Therefore, initially, it became clear that instead of the data I had presented, I would focus on what I wrote. I had to force myself to become an author with a better, more thoughtful thought. Rosently occasionally I was attracted to writing more and at least writing. People want to know what you are ThinkHe will say.
I like to tell people that I was one of the highest levels of job training in journalism.
When I was fresh from college, my boss in Detroit News Once people and extraordinary abilities said that some people can only hear music, and others cannot. I knew I could listen to music as a data analyst and information designer. But I did not listen to music as an author, not yet, and was afraid that I would never do.
It was until 2009, when I Is written About two 11 -year -old boy, one in Massachusetts, the other in Georgia, who had hanged herself at a distance of just 10 days after suffering homo phobic bullying.
I knew what was like a boy suffering from such bullying. I knew that suicide was considered a way, in which a small hand grabs a bottle of bullets. I knew darkness and isolation.
For so many years I thought of the emotions that I used to describe their words.
In writing about these boys, I got my voice. Its root was in writing about the things I knew very closely. I had to quit writing for sound as if I belonged to this page – a form of imitation that was artificial for me – and start writing with soul memories and life experience, weak, poor, lost, second
It was my nine in the “matrix” moment. Now I could see the rhythm of words. They appeared on me as waves.
Since then, I would bow to my real voice, which echoed the voices heard from the elderly black people of my youth. Their storage words were not wide, but their language order, the way they could play with their locks, was unusual to raise their eyes and drama for details.
Then, after Bob Herbert’s departure, I became most of Obama’s era, and colored columnists, and colored columnists, the rise of movement for black life and the first choice of Donald Trump, which I had an ethnic event. Understand.
It changed the column mission for me. I was now writing for the record. I pledged to testify and record this remarkable moment in the history of the country, especially as a black author.
Increasing yourself as an author – and doing it in front of all and all of you – has been a great honor of my life. I listened to the music, and I hope you can hear it through me occasionally. Farewell
