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" During my past career as a journalist, I relished writing obits and equally dreaded phoning relatives for the necessary facts. But to my surprise and great relief, they often wanted to talk - they wanted their recently deceased loved ones recorded in print. "

Tom Rachman

Loved

Writing

Surprise

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Tom Rachman

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" A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best. "

" The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people. "

" Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion. "

" My own career started in New York at the 'Associated Press', a fast-paced news agency where we rarely had time for deep reporting. "

" The question I ask myself is what would have happened if newspapers hadn't initially given their content away for free on the Internet. It's so hard to get people to pay once they are accustomed to having something for free. "

" There are journalists who are drawn to the most extroverted, aggressive jobs because they get an ego high from it. It can be shocking to encounter them and even worse to work with them. "

" The way I found time to write 'The Imperfectionists' was that I took work as a copy editor at the 'International Herald Tribune' in Paris, working full-time for approximately six months, then taking my savings from that and writing full-time, then returning after six months, and so on, until the book was done! "

" When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out. "

" At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel. "