The Year in Humbling
A little over a year ago, I moved from Canada to the US. (My political timing was, uh, impeccable.) The idea was to leave the small, self-congratulatory world of Toronto magazines for the big, self-congratulatory world of New York magazines. Instead, through a series of happy accidents, I wound up working as a producer on a true-crime podcast, despite having almost no experience in either audio production or crime reporting. In 2016, the main thing I learned is that it’s important to do things you suck at.
I was brought on to the podcast because of my background as a writer and editor, but I quickly learned that writing an audio script is nothing like writing a magazine feature. For one, you’re writing for the human voice, which has a way of exposing the frailties and affectations of your prose; there’s no room for two-dollar words or meandering relative clauses. (Unless you’re Jonathan Goldstein, in which case you can get away with whatever you want.) Two, it’s not really “your” writing, since someone else will wind up saying it, and the hosts, the editors, the other producers, the fact-checker, and whoever else happens to be floating around the conference room at edit time will all have ideas of their own. In some ways, this is the best education a working writer could ask for; it’s impossible to be precious about a passage or turn of phrase when the script is being churned through half a dozen people and you’re two days from deadline. Three — and probably most importantly — the writing is not the point. The writing, if anything, is in the way. In radio, the point is to get to the tape.
Right — everyone in podcasting still calls it radio, and everyone talks about tape. (Especially good tape, or the lack thereof.) That’s another thing I learned in 2016: a lot of new words, or old words repurposed. There are tape assemblies, table reads, tracking, and live final mixes to be done. Then there is the dense and impenetrable Pro Tools, a language unto itself. Are you working in shuffle mode, slip mode, grid mode, or spot mode? Is it better to import this piece of tape as a clip group or as session data? Will it sound better as a standard or S-curve crossfade? What’s the playback engine set to? What about the sample rate? Even my choice of examples will reveal me, to a Pro Tools expert, as a novice. And radio itself is a fundamentally different kind of storytelling. It needs to be intimate. It needs to be emotional. It needs to be surprising. It needs to be radically legible. For someone used to reading and writing, this has been like thinking in a whole new dimension — literally, in a whole new sense.
The truth is that learning all this — not just Pro Tools and the jargon but the entire project of making radio — has kicked my ass. When people win awards or wind up on year-end best-of-lists (hello!), they talk a lot about feeling humbled. That, of course, is the precise opposite of what feeling humbled means. Feeling humbled means feeling worthless, and there is no better way to feel worthless than to get plunked in the middle of a bunch of competent, cheerful, aggressively credentialed people and told to do something you don’t know how to do. This piece by Hanna Rosin, about her transition from magazines to radio, eerily captures how 2016 felt for me. “Worse than losing competence is losing the ability to even tell if you are competent or not,” she writes. “If you give me a draft of a magazine story, I’m pretty sure I can tell you what’s wrong with it — if it’s too long or too short or underreported or overwritten or if the third paragraph needs to be switched with the 17th. But with radio, my judgment was off.” It’s easy to bounce back from this sort of feeling when you’re twenty-two years old and an intern and a total idiot. It’s much, much harder when you’re thirty and even the gentlest hangover makes you weep and you gave up a respectable job in Toronto to hurl yourself into the vast, unaffordable, five-borough unknown.
Then, suddenly, once you spend enough time, day in and day out, doing the thing you’re bad at, something strange happens: you get good at it. You learn to tell good tape from bad tape. You can identify the basic beats of a radio story. Even the opaque, multihued wall of a Pro Tools session starts to make sense — and, weirdly, it becomes kind of beautiful. I like Pro Tools now, I get lost in it, headphones on and eyes forward, in a migraine-inducing reverie, to the point of forgetting about meetings and skipping lunch. And I like it because, unlike the airy questions of language and structure that consumed me as a magazine editor, Pro Tools is technical. Whatever your problem is, there is always a solution — you just don’t know how to do it yet. Working in radio, I am, for the first time in what feels a long time, learning entirely new things. Your mother was right, as she always is, when she told you it’s important to keep learning new things.
The secret that radio people jealously guard from print people is this: making radio is fun. It’s social. It’s physical. It’s infuriatingly, unavoidably collaborative. Radio people are generally nicer and less melodramatic than print people, probably because a) they’re fucking dweebs, and so b) whatever egos they have are wrapped up in the work itself, rather than in using the work as a vehicle for banging their peers. Also, it’s nice to be in an industry that has every reason to be optimistic about the future, instead of one in which the bottom is perpetually dropping out. Who knew! Anyway, my point is, you should definitely quit your job and start doing something you’ve never done before, because it will absolutely work out and you’ll be great at it, guaranteed, I promise.
Oh, and I only published a couple of written pieces this year, but this one, for the Awl, about the Westminster dog show, was my favo(u)rite:
Last Monday morning, outside the Piers 92/94 convention center in Hell’s Kitchen, a giant banner read WESTMINSTER KENNEL CLUB in purple and gold, while a trio of Irish wolfhounds — the largest dog breed in the world, regal, grey, long of limb — stood on a patch of grass and urinated gracefully. Nearby, a Bouvier des Flandres sniffed the ground; beyond the line of cabs at the entrance, a shiba inu and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel waited for an elevator to take them inside, where, in the two cavernous halls of the convention center, there were a whole lot more dogs. It was packed, a crush of fur and sweat. Many of the breeds were familiar — bloodhounds, border collies, Boston terriers — but others had names as exotic and beautiful as the animals themselves: keeshonden, cirnechi dell’Etna, löwchen, schipperkes, pulik, salukis, xoloitzcuintli.
