When I was working on my English Lit degree, I found it hard to read a book - any book - without looking for a deeper meaning. There’s that joke people make about literature students making too much of a big deal about the author using the colour blue and I was a walking example of it.
I graduated three years ago and have been working in journalism in some shape or form ever since. I’m a bit of a generalist, so I don’t have a beat that I stick to in particular. That means stories occur to me while I’m doing practically everything: watching TV, talking to my partner, going out with friends.
Most of the time, this is great. I write about everything, from what it’s like to hike under the stars during lockdown to how a bunch of 3D designers came together through TikTok to help a man with Parkinson’s disease. But slowly, I started to realise that when everything I heard, saw, or experienced could potentially be the start of an article, I found it increasingly difficult to experience things in the moment.
My mind was constantly whirring about what I could pitch about next, especially when work was otherwise low on the ground. I saw how far it had gone while watching ‘It’s A Sin’. As a queer person, it was especially heartbreaking to watch a friend group so like some of my own be ripped apart by an insidious disease. It hit close to home in so many ways - but then I almost immediately started thinking through angles of ways to pitch a story around it.
I forced myself to take a step back and slow down. The TV show had made a definite impact - but why did that mean I had to write about it? Taking off my journalist hat, I saw that not everything needs to become content. It’s okay to just feel something, sit with it, discuss it with friends and family, and move on from it.
Sometimes, I feel like there’s the pressure or the drive to be pitching about everything. Pitch callout round-ups are so useful, but they also show such a wide breadth of topics and editors that it can sometimes feel tempting to spread the net wide and try to package your ideas up for as many of them as possible.
For the sake of my mental health and productivity, I’ve had to force myself to leave some ideas or splashes of inspiration by the wayside. Being a generalist doesn’t mean I need to pitch about everything. As soon as I acknowledged that, my ideas got better, my mental health improved, and it was so much easier to have a separation between work time and personal time.
No matter how tempting it might be to turn every personal experience or complicated thought into content of some kind, it’s infinitely better for both you and the quality of content to force yourself to have time away from thinking of ideas.