Most of my writing at work isn’t art

But there are still some important artistic techniques I use.

“Sculpting is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”

--Michelangelo

“It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.”
― Paul Cézanne

Most of what I do at the news station cannot be considered art. It’s not supposed to be. A little bit of craft and technique, sure. Sometimes I even find a chance to turn a phrase that might be slightly artistic. But I am under no delusions that I’m “creating art” when I sit down at my desk. That’s not my job there.

And yet, I thought about it a little bit, and the articles that I write tend to fall into one of two categories, which, for the purposes of this column, I will call “sculpting” and “painting.”

Today, I’m going to discuss my sculpting process. I’m not carving David out of stone, but sometimes I do have to get out my tools and whittle away at a block in order to turn it into something else.