AUTHOR’S GAB, READER TALK.
A LETTER TO YOU, THE READER, SO THAT YOU CAN FINALLY FIGURE OUT WHAT I’M THINKING.
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THIS MONTH: AD-LIBBING for Dummies
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“If you’re afraid to sound like an idiot when you’re AD-LIBBING, then you’re not going to make good Ad-Libs.”
-Adam Levine, vocal coach on NBC’s “The Voice”
Dear Reader,
A few years ago, I went to a regional journalism conference for student members of the Society of Professional Journalists. There were many people there, but somehow several of us managed to cram into the Michigan State’s paper’s newsroom, called The State News, for lunch and a tour. I didn’t really know anybody there, so I started trying to get to know people. One girl, Danielle, and I struck up a conversation and ended up hitting it off. I started telling her about how I wrote this monthly AD-Lib section for my blog, and her response was, “Oh wow. You must really put a lot of work into that.”
It was almost as if she assumed I wrote it like a column, with a specialized something for you readers every month. After that, I started becoming self-conscious about my AD-LIBS, devoting extra time and energy into a near column-like section of this blog on writing tips. In a way, it’s a good thing that I’ve put so much time into this and made it a more special place for you guys to get writing help, but I didn’t realize until recently that Danielle missed a key point about writing in her comments to me: actually AD-LIBBING.
So, for this month, I want to touch on something so brief, but still so important about writing, in particular this column, if you want to call it that: when you write, you also ad-lib. It is so important to remember that writing is not just all work, but it’s play too. You cannot simply present the facts, work hard, check and recheck until things are flawless and expect to have a finished product. Just like you can execute a perfect martial arts move or play a piano piece just right and miss the soul of that move or piece, your writing will sound equally dry if you forget to put your heart into it.
That means shaking loose some of the rigidity and letting go a little bit. It means putting yourself into the writing and sharing it with the world. And, it means sitting down and just writing something, sources or no sources, deadlines or no deadlines.
Just write what’s on your heart. Share that with the world. It will be just as valuable as any bit of hard work you have put into it.
And that, ladies and gentlemens, is AD-LIBBING at its finest.
Think about that.
Sincerely, Your AD-LIBBER,
Jessica Anne McLean
The Rose 