About this blog
Photo by Beatrice Carletti.
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
This blog is about … everything. The majority of my posts are about journalism, but you’ll also find creative non-fiction, assorted rants, and my personal collection of internet treasures.
If pressed, I’d have to admit that this blog’s only unifying theme: Fabiola and everything she’s interested in — hence the “Fab Files”.
My impetus for creating this site was simple: I needed a room of my own on the internet — a place to store things that I’ve polished and published as well as the half-formed musings that keep me human.
If you’re interested in the formalities, you’ll find them in the “About Fabiola” and “Resume” sections of this blog, so I will use this space to share some things that are a little more personal.
I am a Salvadoran-born Toronto-raised twenty-something with a wide assortment of interests and concerns. Despite my best efforts at cold hard realism, I continue to believe that journalists can and must tell the kinds of stories that make positive differences possible at the various levels of human interaction.
But first, I have to make things simple without making them simplistic. I must balance style and substance, often on a tight deadline and with incomplete information.
Ernest Hemingway once said “It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
Well, at the enormous risk of disregarding Hemingway’s advice, I admit herein that I am learning how to write more effectively, think more critically, and contribute more thoughtfully to the defining issues of the day.
Fabiola Carletti
It’s a relatively new thing to have public files tracking your growth as a writer. You can browse my earliest entries if you’d like a good laugh, and I don’t mind because I consider my entire craft a work in progress.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I won’t always get it right. In these cases, I invite your feedback with extra enthusiasm.
I sincerely thank you for visiting this space, and I encourage you to come often.
Dear Fabiola,
I am so glad you have shared with this blog. I was brought to it through one of your articles you wrote ‘Doing Journalism the June Callwood way.’ I’m currently studying an intense journalism course and I was starting to feel confused with the constant informing of how we must write with considerations of our advertisers, shown how to deflect negative interest through P.R skills if working within a company, who in my eyes were behaving unethically, to writing in a voice which sounded a somewhat faint version of mine. But your website has given me the energy to see what I hold in my heart to be true. “The point, I think, is that there comes a time when a young journalist must ask herself what she really wants to achieve in this often amorphous profession and what kind of an agent she imagines herself to be.” – a thousand thank yous Fabiola because now I know.
Jodhi
That’s high praise, Jodhi. I really appreciate it. Believe me, keeping your morale up is a journey, not a destination — especially when you’re out of school and trying to find your niche.
When I’m feeling down, I remember something Samuel G. Freedman wrote in his book Letters to a Young Journalist (2006).
Freedman argues that everyone should enter journalism believing it is a moral enterprise and that “your initial idealism must be a pilot light, flickering at times, but never extinguished.”
Freedman teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, by the way.
If you liked that post about June, you may like some of these other posts:
I don’t, and I will never, know enough
Whatever else changes, we still need a principled press.
Aspiring journalist take note: 24 tips from rising stars
Journalism? Are you crazy?
And … so on and so forth. Haha, this whole blog is kind of like a place I self-medicate when feeling uninspired.
Thanks again for your comment! Do you have your own blog?
-Fabiola