Daily deadlines are a way of life at a newspaper, and it can sometimes be nerve-racking trying to get a story just right as the seconds tick by.

But, when I think about some of the hardest writing I’ve ever done, it didn’t involve coming back late from a basketball game, a football game, or a board meeting.

No. The hardest stories to write came courtesy of my dad.

I was a fairly good kid growing up, but I got into my fair share of trouble. I got a lot of the usual punishments, but my most frequent punishment involved writing an essay, assigned to me by dad, the conferrer of essays.

In those days, anything — and I do mean anything — was grounds for an essay. Messy room? Essay. Getting in trouble at school? Essay. Roughhousing with my younger brothers? Essay. Dirty glasses? Essay.

Now, those essays usually only needed to fill a single page of notebook paper, but, at 8 or 9 years old, there were some days when writing an essay seemed as difficult as climbing Mount Everest.

My dad has a journalism background, so I learned then about the importance of deadlines, because most of them were due a few days after they were assigned. I learned about the importance of clean copy, too, because, if my first effort wasn’t up to par, I had to rewrite it completely or revise it.

The essays covered a wide range of topics.

I once wrote a first-person essay from the point of view of my youngest brother. Others tasked me with making up characters and putting them in original stories. Others recapped movies, books, fishing trips, and summer vacations or involved research on certain birds or fish species.

I even wrote a sarcastic one about how Jeff Gordon was my favorite NASCAR driver, got my picture taken next to his car, and framed it as a Father’s Day gift.

Somewhere along the way, a great number of those essays wound up stashed in a folder, which I recently discovered still has more than five dozen of my old essays in it.

So, as you can tell, I wrote a lot.

I’ll share a few of the highlights here:

∫ An essay on why former Detroit Lions running back Barry Sanders is such a good player.

∫ An essay on the life of Theodore Roosevelt.

∫ A series of essays about a beaver named Bart and his friend Freddy, whose adventures involved going to hockey games, doing typical beaver stuff and going to the movies to watch, you guessed it, “Leave it to Beaver”.

∫ A review of the first concert I ever saw — The Who at the Palace of Auburn Hills.

Those essays are still a fun topic of conversation at family get-togethers, and, just last weekend, I reminisced with my dad about some of the ones that I wrote. I even joked with him that I would start recycling those to fill this column space. So, if you ever see columns describing a hypothetical day in an infant’s life or recapping a summer vacation, you’ll know why.

I’d like to say that the seeds of my future career were planted during the many hours I spent writing those essays. I think, to a certain degree, that’s true, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Somewhere along the way, writing became something I was pretty good at and I guess I have my dad and the lessons learned from writing those essays to thank for that.

I’ll just make sure to stay out of trouble from now on.

James Andersen can be reached at 989-358-5686 or jandersen@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ja_alpenanews.