Yesterday around 3:00 I received some edits back from an article I wrote about an exciting new drilling rig made especially for the North Slope. It drills with coiled tubing! It fits on a very small drill pad! It runs on alternating current instead of hydraulics! See, this is why I decided to write about the oil and gas industry. When I was in college, I tossed my Vogue and my W magazines aside and I said, “Screw fashion. I want to write about drilling rigs.”
And here I am. Accomplisher of goals. Realizer of dreams. Taryn. Maxwell. Peine.
The thing about writing for a living is your worth is subjective. There is no obvious right or wrong answer. You can’t balance a budget to show how good you are. You can’t solve an equation. You can’t increase sales by 25 percent. You just do your best and hurl it out there, then pull out your umbrella and wait for it to be chewed up and spit back at you and hope the crap storm doesn’t mess up your hair.
On top of being a writer, I’m also naturally dramatic. And do you know what there’s no room for in oil and gas writing?
Drama.
Unless it’s coming from the person editing me.
Exhibit A
This is the moment I should have switched majors. This should have been my “A-ha!” moment. In college, I was in a class called “Feature Articles.” I had written a feature article about an old drive-up near OU’s campus. I thought it was a pretty awesome article. I sat through four whole tapes with the ancient owner of the place just to get 30 minutes of him actually talking about the drive-up. My article was returned to me one sunny day with this scrawled across the top: “Your writing is DEPRESSING me!”
Exhibit B
My first oil and gas writing job. An article about volumetric production payments. A call from my boss to come down to her office. She hands me the article, filled with bright red slashes and strike-throughs, peers at me very seriously and says, “Do you NOT want to work here?”
Exhibit C
The article I spoke of previously, about the drilling rig on the North Slope in Alaska. After five years of this, I know better than to insert any creativity anywhere in any article I’m writing, but I took a chance with this one. I decided to describe the drilling conditions in Alaska as “treacherous.” Because aren’t they? I got back the edits yesterday. In six pages of article, I’d used one creative word only. Just one. And like a prized 12-point buck, my word was hunted down, isolated, and killed with this friendly suggestion, “We need to tone down the hyperbole. A lot.”
And you know what that made me realize? Nowhere, in no time in my life has anyone ever asked me to tone UP the hyperbole.
That would be my dream job.
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