Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka once told the story of how he was not employed at the defunct Daily Times Newspaper as a reporter for writing a short story instead of a news story during an employment test.
He ended the story of the career path he opted for with the statement, “thank God I am not a journalist”, which suggested that he probably would not have accomplished his global literary status if he had to be a journalist.
Rather than being a hindrance, journalism can help any determined journalist to accomplish whatever goal he or she has.
Unlike Professor Soyinka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from Colombia who died on April 17, this year at 87 is an accomplished journalist and writer who in 1982 was awarded the coveted Nobel Prize in Literature.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu in an article published in the May / June edition of the Media Review titled Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Journalist and Novelist Extraordinaire: wrote about Marquez’s whose literary accomplishment was enhanced by his journalism career.
“Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel laureate and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, began as a journalist and celebrated the profession even as he won laurels as a novelist”.
Marquez won the Nobel prize ” for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.”
He started as a journalist while studying Law at the National University of Colombia and worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El- Espectator and as a Foreign Correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York.
His journalism was embedded in many of his non- fiction books, including News of a Kidnapping, dealing with the drug barons of his native Colombia.
“Fiction has helped my journalism because it gives it literary value. Journalism has helped my fiction because it has kept me in a close relationship with reality,” García Márquez said in a 1981 interview by Peter H. Stone for The Paris Review.
In another interview Marquez gave an idea of how he was able to combine being a journalist and novelist.
“When I was working for El Espectador in Bogotá, I used to do at least three stories a week, two or three editorial notes every day, and I did movie reviews. Then at night, after everyone had gone home, I would stay behind writing my novels. I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn’t be able to work.”
Journalism has all it takes to take you to whatever height you desire to get to professionally. It is up to you to fully utilize the skills of the profession like Marquez did.
I thank God for Professor Soyinka that he is not a journalist, but I have more reasons to say “thank God” for Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Journalist, Literature Nobel Laureate.
What about you?
Please share with me and other readers how journalism has helped you to accomplish your other goals
NB: I appreciate all who have been reading, sharing, liking and responding to the previous editions of this dairy.
Thanks for your feedbacks and let me get more to enrich this series.
Lekan Otufodunrin
Email: info@mediacareerng.org /Telephone: 08023000621 /Twitter: @lotufodunrin /Skype: lekanskype
