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A Few Kind Words
Thinking Aloud
WAR STORIES
My Left Ear
Telling Facts
Message In A Bottle
What I know about writing really began in 1981, when a nearsighted professor ushered a class of callow Freshman Comp students into a burial crypt.
Ronald Dorr came in, gave out the syllabus, blinked as he took off his glasses. Then without preamble he delivered a first-person account of an exhumed skeleton being ritually compacted with a sledgehammer for an overcrowded Colombian graveyard--as the family, and a young English teacher, looked on.
His first words to us described the cracking of hip bones; after 20 minutes we were sitting in stunned silence, and he smiled.
"Good afternoon," he finally said. "If I had simply told you that my academic specialty is death and dying in various cultures, my introduction to you today would have been forgotten rather quickly. So I have chosen instead to introduce myself to you with telling facts--the kind we all too often tend to smooth over as we become older and less singular.
"You're here to re-learn them."
Looking back on it now, the professor was a great copywriter. Facts followed assertions, identity usurped ambiguity, examples were meaty enough to trickle blood. I was to survive three years with Ronald Dorr, learning to write telling facts under the merciless lash of his red pen.
It was a struggle. I became a reporter, an editor, a copywriter at the small chaotic places that would have me. Each time I learned a little more--usually by the seat of my pants--as I tried to find a place that could help me perfect my line of work.
Telling facts.
Because that's what excites me about my business: devouring facts, then presenting them with equal doses of clarity and creativity. There is a point of view. Plenty of good, hard thinking. An evolving set of challenges. To use my old professor's favorite word, it is a singular business.
If that is your business, there is only one fact to tell.
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