Something for us all to aspire to: Be remembered like David Carr

New York Times media columnist David Carr died suddenly Thursday night.

If you want to aspire to something, you might go for being remembered the way Carr was when news of his death emerged. If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, it was almost nothing but tweets about David Carr once the news hit.

My stream is an almost unbroken flood of sadness and memories of David Carr and what a wonderful human being and journalist he was

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) February 13, 2015

What you see in your Twitter feed now is how generous @carr2n was, how many lives he touched, how he represented the best of our biz

— Andrew O'Hehir (@andohehir) February 13, 2015

Vox collected some of Carr’s best answers from a Reddit Ask Me Anything. Much of it is great advice for writers. Carr, 58, was known for his generosity to younger writers.

My favorite among his gems of advice: “Keep typing until it turns into writing.” I’ve used that method myself on deadline.

Last year Carr was interviewed by Bloomberg’s Andrew Lack on a video that ran on Boston University’s BU Today site. In the last question, Lack notes that journalism can be a lot of things, but a get-rich-quick scheme is not one of them. Carr’s reply:

The dirty secret: journalism has always been horrible to get in; you always have to eat so much crap to find a place to stand. I waited tables for seven years, did writing on the side. If you’re gonna get a job that’s a little bit of a caper, that isn’t really a job, that under ideal circumstances you get to at least leave the building and leave your desktop, go out, find people more interesting than you, learn about something, come back and tell other people about it—that should be hard to get into. That should be hard to do. No wonder everybody’s lined up, trying to get into it. It beats working.

Here is Carr’s archive at NYTimes.com. There are 1,776 stories.