A Liminal Survey of the Journalistic Writing Process
Savvy Sleevar
Savvy Sleevar is a Journalism major at the University of Missouri and student in the Liminality and the Sciences Seminar of the Honors College.
Over the course of this semester, I have embarked on several liminal journeys. From signing my first ever apartment lease to learning how to date in college, this year has been full of transitional periods. Even in my academic life, liminality is omnipresent. To diversify my journalism resume, I joined the Opinions section of The Maneater, MU’s student newspaper, at the beginning of the semester. As I’ve discovered, writing for Opinions is nothing like writing for other sections of the paper, and being a columnist has pushed me to new heights as a reporter. Likewise, I’ve found my course load this semester to be both challenging and enriching, and I’m especially enraptured by all that I’ve learned in Liminality and the Sciences. As I anticipated, learning about liminality is a liminal experience in and of itself, and in a rather meta way, it has helped me to better comprehend life’s in-between spaces.
Little did I know that my exploration of liminality this semester would inform my very first Opinions column as a Maneater journalist. While I fully anticipate that this article will pale in comparison to my future work as a learning writer, for now, it marks an exciting milestone for me. Further, writing this piece allowed me to look critically at the journalistic writing process and take note of all the liminal periods that journalists must pass through every time they produce new content. The drafting, editing and publishing processes are full of liminal elements, making journalists acutely aware of how liminal spaces continuously shape us.
This semester was my first opportunity to write columns for The Maneater’s Opinions section. I have written three pieces so far, and all of them act as social commentaries on a diverse array of issues. Namely, my columns tackle topics like reproductive rights, meritocracy and, in my first column specifically, the negative implications of unchecked liminality. In this column, titled “The dreaded ‘sophomore slump’ warrants flexibility from students and robust support from universities,” I use liminality to explain why students’ feelings of uncertainty during college’s middle years are both valid and deserving of university-wide attention (Sleevar, 2022).
Frankly, I was hesitant to even write this piece in the first place. I believed in the power of my central thesis, but I was ambivalent about my ability to articulate the complexities of liminality in a concise, digestible way. With some convincing from the paper’s Editor-in-Chief and Head Copy Chief, however, I decided to pursue the column. And after conducting interviews for the piece, I knew I could pair my analysis with the words of experts to properly describe liminality’s impact on college students in the midst of the sophomore slump. As aforementioned, writing this article put me in a very interesting headspace: I was so intently focused on liminality that I was able to pick up on the liminal rhythms of the writing process more broadly. Based on my knowledge of liminality and my own experiences as a student journalist, I believe there are three major liminal passageways that await every journalistic writer working on a new piece of content.
The Drafting Process
Journalists will first encounter liminality in the early stages of the writing process. After reporters finish researching, interviewing and gathering all other necessary information, they must actually put words on the page and produce a first draft for their editors to read.
Unfortunately for these journalists in the doldrums of the drafting process, getting started is often the hardest part of writing an article. Drafting is uniquely liminal in the sense that a
700-something-word narrative is expected to emerge on a previously blank page. Furthermore, drafting demands transformation. As I wrote my debut Opinions column, for instance, I had to convert two half-hour interviews into only a handful of quotes, a decision-making process that required time, energy and an understanding of journalism’s societal role, which is to accurately inform readers.
In the same way that the Ediacaran Period was the slow-moving precursor to the Cambrian Explosion, drafting is the gradual effort to convert an outline into a functioning piece of journalism. To combat the severe writer’s block I experienced as I pieced this column together, I made a bulleted list of the main points I wished to discuss. Slowly but surely, I replaced each bullet with paragraphs, effectively navigating the liminal space between a mere idea and a first draft.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a slow writer, but writer’s block itself is actually rare for me. Not only was the writer’s block I stumbled upon while drafting this column rather unexpected, it also turned my liminal impasse into a physical journey. Funnily enough, I wasn’t able to get my draft done until I was far away from MU campus, staying at home for a weekend with my family. Certainly, I could have willed myself to write something in any physical location, but for some reason, a trip home was just what I needed to actually get the words out. My experience was “was a necessary journey … that reveals what has been hidden” (Carson & Franck, 2022, p. 14). The sentences I wanted to string together were swirling around in the recesses of my brain all along — I simply had to coax them to the surface with a physical enactment of my liminal passage.
The Editing Process
For me, the drafting process is where I end up allocating the majority of my time and energy. In some cases, however, the editing process is just as demanding as writing the original draft. This was the case as I traversed through the four-part editing process for “The dreaded ‘sophomore slump’ warrants flexibility from students and robust support from universities.” During this particularly tedious editing process, I rewrote my opening paragraphs, reordered entire chunks of copy and cut several hundred works so that the article could go into The Maneater’s October print edition. Due to the rapidly approaching print deadline, I was addressing edits on the same night that production editors were formatting the layout of the paper. In short, my brain could have caught fire at any moment that evening.
During this and every editing process, it’s crucial to recognize the liminality of the situation. Articles that go through multiple rounds of edits are never quite the same afterwards, turning journalists addressing edits into liminal travelers — individuals who must be willing to abandon the structure of their first draft in favor of new insights from various editors. In essence, journalists receiving edits cannot afford to be closed systems, or entities that are “unable to take in nourishment or expel waste” (Withrow, 2022, p. 19). Instead, journalists must be open systems, willing to let go of their established article structure in the hopes of producing a more nuanced, enriching piece.
The Publishing Process
After a strenuous writing process and an even more involved editing process, my article was published (making the October print edition, no less!). Despite the relief I felt when the column finally came out, I knew that the time in between this column and the next one would be a little awkward to navigate. Luckily, The Maneater regularly grants its writers the opportunity to talk about their latest pieces at length on The Maneater Digest podcast. From a liminal perspective, this discussion-oriented ritual helps writers ceremoniously send their articles off into the world, priming them for their next project at the same time. What I find fascinating about the role of ritual in this liminal scenario is that it’s so similar to Ritual: A Very Short Introduction’s (2015) analysis of ritualized behavior in the animal kingdom. “Huxley [a scientist studying Crested Grebe courtship] viewed this [ritual] behavior as … a means of establishing … mutually advantageous emotional states” (Stephenson, 2015, p. 8). Like the Crested Grebe mating rituals Huxley observed in the wild, The Maneater Digest also capitalizes on ritualized actions to establish mutually advantageous conditions. Namely, the podcast is hosted and produced by members of The Maneater’s Multimedia section. Therefore, Maneater writers can acknowledge their liminal futures on the podcast, and multimedia reporters can simultaneously use this opportunity to fine-tune their content production skills in-house.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the publishing process is the fact that it’s a microcosm for what journalism as a whole may feel like for some reporters. On its face, a career in journalism is nothing more than an endless cycle of article writing. Journalists must accept liminality as a fact of life, and they must constantly transition to new pieces for the sake of journalistic standards like timeliness. However, journalism is more than the sum of its parts. As writers move from article to article, they take with them the valuable lessons they’ve learned from previous liminal scenarios. While journalism could be characterized as a perpetual, exhausting dance with liminality, true fulfillment for journalists appears as they continue to challenge themselves in their craft, using their liminal experiences to their advantage and embracing the idea that their reporting will challenge a flawed status-quo in favor of something better, albeit unknown.
References
Carson, T. L., & Franck, S. (2022). The path of initiation. In T. L. Carson (Ed.), The Liminal Loop: Astonishing Stories of Discovery and Hope. Lutterworth Press.
Sleevar, S. (2022, October 11). The dreaded ‘sophomore slump’ warrants flexibility from students and robust support from universities. The Maneater.
https://themaneater.com/the-dreaded-sophomore-slump-warrants-flexibility-from-student s-and-robust-support-from-universities/
Stephenson, B. (2015). Ritual: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press, USA. Withrow, L. R. (2022). Wayfinding to freedom. In T. L. Carson (Ed.), The Liminal Loop: Astonishing Stories of Discovery and Hope. Lutterworth Press.
Recent Comments