COMM 337: Profiles - Donald Murray and finding pleasure in the challenge of a blank piece of paper

Since you're going to write some profiles for Tuesday, I thought I'd put up a few so you can get a better idea of how they're written out in the world. Plus ... these aren't just random profiles. They're about Donald Murray, author of our textbook "Writing to Deadline."

The first is by Chip Scanlan, writing for the Poynter.org website (put up by the Poynter journalism foundation). Scanlan noted in his lede that Murray wrote his last column for The Boston Globe five days before his death at the age of 82 on Dec. 30, 2006. And he quoted that last column, which was almost eerie in its timing:

“Each time I sit down to write I don’t know if I can do it,” Murray wrote in [the column, headlined] “Finding Pleasure in the Challege of a Blank Sheet.” “The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can.”

Jack Driscoll, retired editor of The Boston Globe, wrote a tribute to Murray in January 2007 in Rye Reflections, a citizens journalism project in Rye, N.H. He combined lede, description, nut graf and a strong quote as he began his reminiscence. He started with a word picture:

My most vivid image of Don Murray is of him sitting outside a restaurant on a bench, wearing his customary chinos, head down, writing away in his daily journal — or maybe even drawing sketches. He is alone in his writer’s world as chatting customers pass him by.

He is early for our lunch, a monthly ritual the last dozen years (his late wife, Minnie Mae sometimes joined us, an honor). Prior to that we had been professional colleagues for several years, then just friends. It was a loss to me to learn of his sudden death at age 82 on December 30. But it was also a loss to thousands of others — former students he had in class and in dozens of seminars during his days as a professor, colleagues at the University of New Hampshire with whom he had long, close relationships, readers of his many books and of his weekly column in the Boston Globe, his morning breakfast group in Durham and so many more.

He was a magnificent writer. No, he was a magnificent teacher. Indeed, his writing was teaching.

“In writing about myself, I am writing about others,” Murray would say. He was tricking us into thinking we were absorbed in his memories, when in fact he was awakening our own stories.

Driscoll's tribute is worth reading in full - and bookmarking for future reference. Murray once shared a page from his daybook, or writer's journal, with some of his colleagues in New Hampshire. He wrote:

There are two glass patio doors to my right facing the woods, a window just to the left above my computer screen. The squirrel circus does not distract me when the writing flows. And it isn't just when I am at my computer. James Thurber once said, "I never quite know when I'm writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, 'Damn it, Thurber, stop writing.' She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph." I write in the car, across the dinner table from my wife, in front of the television, waiting on the bench at the front of the supermarket, visiting the doctor, waiting in line at the post office, watching my grandchildren play. I am in this life and in the other, writing.

That story of Thurber's is one of my favorites. It means he was always trying out words and combinations of words in his mind. He was writing. He was a writer. So was Murray. So, obviously, is Driscoll.

Murray sparked off lots of short, snappy quotes, like a roman candle. Driscoll calls them "one-liners." He quotes a good half dozen. And he ends his tribute with what I think is a perfect kicker:

His one-liners ring in my head. My favorite occurred the day I hired him as writing coach at the Globe when I was Editor there. He meandered across the cityroom and entered my office with the boast: “I know who three of your best writers are.”

I fell for the bait. “Who?”

“That woman there, that woman over there, and that man there.”

“OK,” I conceded. “You just pointed to three of our very best writers. How did you know?”

“Because,” he said, “their lips move when they write.”

Think about it. Their lips move because they're trying out the sound of the words. The best writing has the rhythm, the cadence of ordinary speech. And that doesn't happen by accident. We have to work for it. But that's a subject for another day.

Chip Scanlan wrote his first piece, the obit quoted above, on deadline the day Murray died. The following day, Dec. 31, he followed up with "An Appreciation of Don Murray: The Things He Gave" beginning with the day he first met Murray years before at The Providence (R.I.) Journal. Scanlan said "he taught me some of the most important things I know about life and writing," and shared them:

• Never be afraid to admit you’re human.
• It takes the greatest strength to admit you’re weak.
• It takes the greatest courage to admit you’re afraid.
• If a teacher asks a student to write, the teacher must write as well, for writing is the great leveler; students see that even the expert in front of the class struggles to make meaning with words. (Editors should do the same, at least a couple of times a year.)
• All writing is revision.
• When someone you love is sick, you become their caregiver, as he did during the long years of illness suffered by [Murray's wife] Minnie Mae before her death in 2005.
• For writers, professionalism – making deadlines, rewriting when the need arose — is everything.
• What you write is what you are capable of writing today.
• You are a writer by virtue of one action: you write.

What I like most about Don Murray's books about writing is that they're about more than writing. Like Scanlan says, they're "about life and writing." There are lots of good books on technique out there. [Check out Anne Lamott, too, and her explanation of how a "sh-tty first draft" helps overcome perfectionism in "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life."] There it is again. Writing. Life. How they fit together. The reason Murray's little green book won't go away in my journalistic writing class this semester isn't what he says about technique, although that's important. It's because I find so much wisdom in his attitude to writing - and to life.