Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Dear Reader,
It was wholly a pleasure to be asked for advice. As a Southern matron I know who lives just this side of the Mississippi down in Lake Village, and who over the years has acquired an accent to match her locale, might say, “Why, I’m just flattered.”
Or, to put it more phonetically, Why, Ah’m just flahtt-hed.
Because there are few things more flattering than to be asked for guidance. In this case, you’re making a request on behalf of somebody else. As you explain, “A friend is trying out for an editorial-writing position at a small newspaper in Georgia, where she lives. She has not been in the newspaper business before, but has written a few columns for that newspaper. She’s asking me for advice. What’s yours?”
Happy to oblige, ma’am. I hope your friend gets the job because it sounds wonderful: Small town. A town she knows well. It took me years to learn just the surface of Pine Bluff, Ark., where I got to spend three decades, raise a family, and be married to the most civilizing influence in my life. Your friend is mighty lucky.
As for advice, it’s the smallest coin in current circulation (A. Bierce), so your friend will never be short of it. There’s lots of it going around.Advice often substitutes for help. Here’s mine:
(1) Appeal to local standards and at the same time try to raise them. Which is a mighty neat trick, but it may be the only one worth doing with an editorial page. (2) When your friend is sure she’s right, forget caution.
Those are the two best pieces of advice I ever got about editorial writing. Which I’m afraid is a dying art. Both were offered just in passing by two very different, and very good, publishers.
Say things everybody knows but nobody’s said before. “We read to find out what we already know.”
Go to the second level of an issue: its deeper meaning, the moral of the story.
Never sit down to write an editorial but to say something. Make it new. Provoke. Take a risk every day. Or you’ll wind up just repeating the same old, safe platitudes.
Be fair-mercilessly fair. Always polite, yes, but uncompromising when it comes to principle.
Stay local. Use the local lingo, place names, vernacular. Vary style and presentation, from the epistolary (“Letter to the Folks Back Home”) to the narrative. (“The bagger at Kline’s Grocery at Second and State looked worried. It seems . . .”)
Write with feeling, edit with reason. Here’s another way to put it: Write drunk, edit sober.
Read poetry. It trains the ear, revives the soul, brings out the spirit within prose, and trains our language so it can be heard, not just read. Speak the speech, I pray you . . . trippingly on the tongue. Pick your own favorite poet. Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost . . . . It doesn’t matter so long as they’re good. Refuse to devalue the language; it’s abused enough already.
There, that’ll do for starters. It was my pleasure. No trouble at all. Writing about writing is so much easier than actually writing, at least in a way that engages others. Wish your friend luck for me. Tell her I’m envious. And sign me
Small Town Boy
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Dear Fellow Editor,
It is always a great pleasure to hear from you, this time made greater by your having noticed my use of an old-fashioned word in a piece observing this year’s anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“Chifferobe,” you write, “is a fine period-piece of a word, now seldom heard, though I have my grandmother’s chifferobe, or so she called it, filled with quilts. Seeing the word brought to mind part of a favorite poem by William Carlos Williams, lines that would occasionally come to mind during those long City Council meetings I used to cover: Work hard all your young days and they’ll find you too, some morning staring up under your chiffonier at its warped bass-wood bottom and your soul-out!
-among the little sparrows behind the shutter.
Thank you for the gift of those words.
When I wrote the word chifferobe in that editorial, I pictured an old woman, too, one who lived in a sad little house far out in the country, at the end of a long gravel road, as she gazed at a picture on her chifferobe, a faded photograph of an older brother in uniform, a brother she never really knew, for he’d never returned from a war now far in the past. I once knew a woman like that in my childhood. She always wore black after the day the telegram arrived from the War Department.
Be well, old friend in the Old South, stay strong and keep writing. All the best from another
Inky Wretch
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial, Pages 16 on 12/18/2013