{"id":742,"date":"2011-12-22T16:15:23","date_gmt":"2011-12-22T21:15:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/?p=742"},"modified":"2011-12-22T16:15:23","modified_gmt":"2011-12-22T21:15:23","slug":"known-unknowns-4-guest-post-4-steve-huff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/known-unknowns-4-guest-post-4-steve-huff\/","title":{"rendered":"Known Unknowns #4, Guest Post #4: Steve Huff"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton742\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fknown-unknowns-4-guest-post-4-steve-huff%2F&amp;text=Known%20Unknowns%20%234%2C%20Guest%20Post%20%234%3A%20Steve%20Huff&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fknown-unknowns-4-guest-post-4-steve-huff%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><div id=\"fb_share_1\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px;\"><a name=\"fb_share\" type=\"box_count\" share_url=\"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/known-unknowns-4-guest-post-4-steve-huff\/\" href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php\">Share<\/a><\/div><div><script src=\"http:\/\/static.ak.fbcdn.net\/connect.php\/js\/FB.Share\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/div><p><em>This Week&#8217;s Ongoing Question: <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">How Do You Know When You&#8217;re Done With a Piece of Writing?<\/span> Tomorrow&#8217;s Guest Poster: Alice Bradley<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>Steve Huff, freelance writer and journalist<\/h3>\n<p>I came to journalism from blogging. I discovered as soon as someone was paying me to write the stuff I&#8217;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 <em>much<\/em> closer attention to the way I verified, organized and worded the information.<\/p>\n<p>Judging when I&#8217;m done became pretty dicey at times. As a casual blogger I&#8217;d often reached what I thought was an ideal stopping point, checked for spelling issues (my pet peeve) grammar (I&#8217;m a lazy grammarian), then thought, &#8220;Aw, screw it, it&#8217;s only the Internet&#8221; and hit &#8220;publish.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Doing professional work &#8212; and keep in mind I&#8217;ve learned &#8216;on the job,&#8217; as I majored in Classical Voice in college, not Journalism &#8212; is technical and emotional. You have to hit the old Ws &#8212; who, what, when, etc &#8212; but personally I don&#8217;t feel the piece is complete if there isn&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;ve often asked myself to really determine if I&#8217;m ready to send the piece to the editor or hit &#8220;publish&#8221; myself is &#8220;Does this sound like it could have been written by a smart machine?&#8221; If it doesn&#8217;t, I know I&#8217;m at least close to home.<\/p>\n<p>Otherwise, the only work I&#8217;ve had published has been poetry, which was an entirely different animal. Hell, I&#8217;m still not sure those pieces are &#8220;done.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/stevehuff\" target=\"_blank\">Steve Huff<\/a><\/span> has written for truTV, Village Voice Media, The Daily Beast and CBS News&#8217; 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&#8217;d rather be dodging copperheads while running in the woods around Roswell, Georgia, or online tweeting out his inner idiot.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div id=\"tweetbutton742\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fknown-unknowns-4-guest-post-4-steve-huff%2F&amp;text=Known%20Unknowns%20%234%2C%20Guest%20Post%20%234%3A%20Steve%20Huff&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mattdebenham.com%2Fblog%2Fknown-unknowns-4-guest-post-4-steve-huff%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 0;text-align:left;text-indent:-9999px;display:block;\">Tweet<\/a><\/div><p>Today, freelance writer\/snake dodger Steve Huff shares his thoughts on done-ness, as formed by his experiences in journalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":746,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions\/746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mattdebenham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}