The Tender Bar

by J.R. Moehringer

The first step in learning, I decided, was unlearning, casting off old habits and false assumptions. No one had ever explained this to me, but during my tryout it became obvious. On deadline there was no time for old habits, no time to do what I normally did before writing—making lists of big words and worrying about how I would sound. There was only time for facts, and so the unlearning happened by necessity, almost by force. Before writing a story for the Times I’d take a deep breath and tell myself to tell the truth, and I would find the words, or they would find me. I didn’t have any illusions. I wasn’t writing poetry. I wasn’t writing very well at all. But at least what I saw each morning under my byline was different. There was a clarity about it, an authority, which I’d never managed to achieve before, certainly not while working on my Publicans novel.