Journalism or Literature

“I write well. Should I go for Literature or Journalism? This was the question I was faced up to with since I was fourteen and thought I could do well if I took up writing as a profession. By the point it was time to select between the 2 apparently congruent fields, a new three year BSc program in Mass Media had newly been introduced in Indian colleges, and I just joined the swarming masses of future’s trained advertisers and journalists. The 1st class in journalism and I knew, O God! This isn’t where I belong! The opening lesson laid down obviously how unfit a 19-year-old, dreamy-eyed, book-loving fantasist was in the ‘realities of actuality’. My story-writing abilities had no result with the story-writing of a paper. In reality, with small room for creativeness, there wasn’t any place at all for imagination. No wordplay, no symbolism, no flowery descriptions, not even a little safe subjectivity. The most worrying difference between a fictional article and a paper report, for me, was the elemental style in which the 2 are routinely presented. Those meaty pieces of info that I might have ordinarily kept for the last or spattered here and there to keep the suspense building and make my story fascinating, needed to be given out in the lead paragraph and leave the uninteresting chances and ends for the remainder of the article. They call it the reversed pyramid structure.

To me, it was actually the murder of all appeal. Of course, they have their reasons why papers agree on such a dry, uninspired style of writing. You know, you’d be worth zilch or just about nothing (for no less than you do not have messy grammar, we could do with difficult vocabulary) if you used to be a gold-medalist Master of English Literature.

But, if you can write ‘crisp’, bone-dry, unimaginative stories with ‘working knowledge’ of the language, then you’re in some demand ( however only if you’re not so money-minded. Patience teaches you penury is a great virtue. ).

No, it was not a total waste of 3 years, this degree course in Journalism.

There’s another offshoot of journalism where the guidelines of writing are slightly relaxed and one can select about any style. It is known as ‘feature writing’. These are ‘newsworthy’, human-interest stories with the liberty to express your perspective, but one wants to be certain there’s tiny self-indulgence (the employment of first person, ‘I’). Or you might be a journalist where your subjects may be explicit or anything under the sun! Except for you to be accepted as a reporter by a paper you ought to have spent mule’s years gaining credibility as a correspondent or you’ve got to be a celeb of some type so that your words have some ‘news price’. So, selecting between a course in Literature or Journalism, simply on the supposition of your talent for writing could prove rather terrible.