“You have to go for what you want, and everything else falls into place.”
By Tona Brown on “From violin to voice, from tenor to mezzo soprano, from man to woman,” by Gillian Gaynair, The Virginian-Pilot, April 10, 2007

If I go for what I want…
I will do reporting several days at the same place.
I will get people to feel comfortable with me, with my camera.
I will forget that I’m reporting from the outside.
I will be able to write from the inside, and words will be the limit separating me from the story.
I will take pictures of what I would love to write; I will write what cannot be said on a picture.
I will choose the stories I think need to be told. I will push for those stories to be published.
I will write without fear of running out of time. Of words that help me say what I want to say.
I won’t have trouble finding the words that are fairest to the story. There will be no roundabouts and all the paragraphs will be connected like the streets I walked in search of a story…

And everything else will fall into place…
I won’t find the perfect word on my first try, but the fun will be on finding it. An afternoon, one day or three days will seem like the right time to report on my story. One phone call will take me to a person to profile, and this person will tell me about the entire community, and the story about the community will be several stories in one, with faces taking me from one paragraph to another, and voices resonating behind, inspiring me to move on, go outside and find another story. And I will go outside, and the story will be there. And then I will wonder where I was when I couldn’t go outside, find and then write more stories. And I will remember that I was too busy learning other things. Then I will realize that it was because I learned all that, that I could tell this stories like I wanted to. That it was because I was so busy –even though I’ve been seeing it as a limit, more than an inspiration- that now I can feel confident to write like I do. That it’s now that I understand when stories are better told, when I can build them better, when my reporting is not enough, when I should have asked more questions, when that is not the story I wanted to write. It’s only now that I see the story on one page when I’m writing it, and I can close my eyes and imagine when the story needs a photograph, when I would love to see the faces of those who talked to me, and when a video or even audio would be too much information, because part of the story consists of the reader imaginating what he or she cannot see. Then, journalism reporting would be like writing a short novel, a short story. But a story about the life outside. The story I want to write.