I don’t know how the sports and news writers do it. The Sundance Film Festival was my first foray of having to file reports and edit stories from the road, and it’s not fun. Some writers have to do that kind of thing every day. That’s their job. They follow the story, learn what they can from an event, a speech or a game and then turn around and write a story immediately. They have to in order for it to get edited and ready for the next day’s paper. I can’t do that. I need time to reflect on what I just saw. I need a few hours for it all to sink in, to contemplate everything and then devise a way to craft it into something worthwhile.
Luckily for me, I only have to do that once a week. Sundance was fun, but it reminded me of being on tour8212;eating bad gas station food and drinking terrible coffee because you’re running on four hours of sleep and need to stay awake for the rest of the day. Only instead of riding in a van for hours on end, you sit in a dark theater8212;and sometimes that can be just as rough as staring at the vast nothingness of Nebraska for what feels like an eternity. But when it’s all said and done, if you asked if I’d do the whole thing again next year, I’d tell you the truth: I wouldn’t miss it for anything.
Trevor Hale