By
Roy Peter ClarkVice President and Senior Scholar
I've seen the future of newspaper writing, and his name is
Ben Montgomery. Among his other accomplishments, young Ben is the founder of
Gangrey.com, an amazing Web site devoted to good writing as a way of forestalling the death of newspapers. Visit that site and you'll find a brat pack of hot young writers sharing stories and ideas about their craft.
Ben brought that creative energy with him to Poynter last week, teaching a session about writing narrative on deadline at a seminar run by
Tom French. As an aging tiger, I was delighted to fill my notebook with practical and inspirational advice shared by Ben. One strategy, headed straight for my toolbox, is: "Let the walls talk."
It's a reporting and writing strategy you can use today. But how do walls talk? Think posters, signs, schedules, bulletin boards, billboards, graffiti. Expand this idea to bumper stickers.
I remember a formative reporting experience when Howell Raines, then political editor of the
St. Pete Times, took me to a political barbecue out in the piney Florida woods. When we got there, the first thing he did was to work his way through the dusty parking lot looking for bumper stickers. He wanted those bumpers to talk to him, to let him know how many at that event wore their support for George Wallace on the back of their pickup trucks.
Somehow, this memory called to mind one of the most powerful images in modern American literature. It appears in
"The Great Gatsby" after the narrator describes the landscape along the motorway connecting West Egg and New York as a "valley of ashes."
Then the narrator comes upon a billboard:
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic -- their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
Faceless eyes. F. Scott Fitzgerald lets the walls -- or in this case the billboard -- talk.
I'm looking up from my desk to see about what my office walls says about me:
- There's the smiling image of the late writing coach Donald Murray, and another one of baseball coach Don Zimmer.
- There’s the somber face of my grandfather, Peter Marino, on a large Republican campaign poster from the 1930s. He's running for the New York State assembly.
- There's a photo of the ship, the Nord America, that carried him and his family from Naples to Ellis Island.
- There is a copy of the ship's manifest.
- There is a Beatles calendar.
- There's a photo of my mother holding a "Let's go Yankees!" sign.
- There's a quote from Eugene Patterson: "Don't just make a living, make a mark."
- There's a monologue from Dr. Evil written by Mike Myers: "The details of my life are quite inconsequential ... ."
- There's a photo of a Jack Russell terrier.
- There's a sticky note from my daughter Lauren: "Love Ya! Have a great day, Dad!"
Yikes! The wall above my desk is talking about me, for anyone who cares to listen.
Consider this lead by Francis X. Clines, written in 1988 when Clines covered the violence in Belfast for
The New York Times:
Beyond the coffin, out in the churchyard, red-haired Kathleen Quinn was full of fun and flirting shamelessly for all her eight years of life. "Mister, I'm to be on the TV tonight," she told a stranger, squinting up happy and prim. Kathleen had taken her brother's bike and skinned her knee bloody, all while people were praying goodbye inside the church to another rebel body in another coffin.
Soon the cameras were watching the coffin being carried out from the windowless fortress of a church, down the curl of the street in the simple hamlet, and on to the ever-filling graveyard patch devoted to republican rebels.
As it turned out, the television ignored Kathleen and missed a classic Irish truth, a sight for sore eyes. She climbed back on the bike and headed off in a blur, oblivious to a piece of nearby graffiti that seemed about all of life's withering dangers: "I wonder each night what the monster will do to me tomorrow."
Clines lets the walls of Belfast talk.
Ben Montgomery shared a powerful example of this strategy from a column by
Dan Barry. Here's the lead:
A monthly calendar, courtesy of a gas station on Jerome Avenue, hangs in the kitchen of a spare apartment in the Bronx. The 14 pencil strokes upon its face represent 14 successive days this month that one family got past without incident.
But the space reserved for Saturday the 15th remains unmarked, as do all the July days that follow. That is because Saturday the 15th is the day the youngest in this family, a fussing bundle of boyhood called Bryce McMillan, all of 23 months, fell out a seventh story window.
It turns out, the child fell clutching a pillow, which cushioned his fall and prevented fatal injuries.
He fell and fell and did not stop until he hit a small swatch of grass, close to an old fallout shelter sign and around the corner from another sign saying keep off the grass. Thirty pounds of Bryce meets the green earth of the Bronx.
The writer lets the calendar talk and the signage talk. And he's clever enough to take advantage of coincidence: that the child should fall out of a window and onto the grass near an old fallout shelter sign and a keep-off-the-grass warning.
So, with me, say thanks to Ben Montgomery for encouraging us to let the walls talk. And be sure to visit
Gangrey.com.
Do you have any examples to share when you've let the walls talk?
trying again -- here's the link from August 2003's issue...
