Known Unknowns #4, Guest Post #4: Steve Huff

This Week’s Ongoing Question: How Do You Know When You’re Done With a Piece of Writing? Tomorrow’s Guest Poster: Alice Bradley

Steve Huff, freelance writer and journalist

I came to journalism from blogging. I discovered as soon as someone was paying me to write the stuff I’d been doing for kicks as a blogger that my seat-of-the-pants approach was not going to work anymore. I had to write cleaner, tighter prose and pay much closer attention to the way I verified, organized and worded the information.

Judging when I’m done became pretty dicey at times. As a casual blogger I’d often reached what I thought was an ideal stopping point, checked for spelling issues (my pet peeve) grammar (I’m a lazy grammarian), then thought, “Aw, screw it, it’s only the Internet” and hit “publish.”

Doing professional work — and keep in mind I’ve learned ‘on the job,’ as I majored in Classical Voice in college, not Journalism — is technical and emotional. You have to hit the old Ws — who, what, when, etc — but personally I don’t feel the piece is complete if there isn’t some kind of note of humanity in it. The strange thing about writing about real situations and real people, not having a fiction writer’s leeway to change and re-order events, is it really can become kind of mechanical. The narrative (particularly where crime is concerned) can start to pace out like a dry, robotically-worded police report. So one question I’ve often asked myself to really determine if I’m ready to send the piece to the editor or hit “publish” myself is “Does this sound like it could have been written by a smart machine?” If it doesn’t, I know I’m at least close to home.

Otherwise, the only work I’ve had published has been poetry, which was an entirely different animal. Hell, I’m still not sure those pieces are “done.”

Steve Huff has written for truTV, Village Voice Media, The Daily Beast and CBS News’ Crimesider crime blog. Steve has also done talking-head work about high-profile crimes in the news for CBS, NBC, MSNBC and HLN. On the whole he’d rather be dodging copperheads while running in the woods around Roswell, Georgia, or online tweeting out his inner idiot.