Writing Tools

How do writers read?

I've come to believe that writers see things in texts that are invisible to others. Moreover, I have a theory that the best writers are the best readers, possessed with a kind of X-ray vision that allows them to peer through the surface of a text, to see the machinery whirring underneath.

The surface of the text -- and three or four levels beneath it -- reveals the author's intended meaning along with meanings derived from the reader's experience and imagination. That "crust" of the text may answer the question "what," but beneath it lies the answers to the question "how."

How did the writer capture my attention? How did she surprise me? How did he make that passage so clear and comprehensible?

When I first heard of the death of reclusive author J.D. Salinger, who was 91, the news reminded me of the first time I used the F-word.

The year was 1956. I was 8 years old. One of the Masterson brothers told me a joke, and he thought it was so funny I ran home to tell my mother. She didn't laugh and made me repeat it to my father. Things did not go well.

I know exactly where I first encountered the F-word in print. I was a freshman in high school, and the book was called "The Catcher in the Rye," a work still on many banned-books lists, not just because of the F-word. I now own six copies of the book, including my high school edition in which I underlined each use of the F-word and other obscenities.

I consider "Catcher" a true gift from Salinger, a literary legacy I can still savor, in spite of my subsequent disillusionment with the author's eccentric isolationism, disdain for his readers, and weird attraction to girls a fraction of his age.

Salinger used the F-word in a perfect literary context for me at that time of my first reading, about 1963...

When you live inside the English language, you begin to see associations that are invisible to others, the way that the little kid in the movie "The Sixth Sense" sees dead people. Making connections between words is, indeed, a lively art.

I remember the day I bumped into my colleague Vanessa Goodrum, who was dressed in a gray fleece vest with a white Poynter logo on it. Since I'd seen her wear it a number of times, I said to her, "Hmmm ... looks like that vest was a good in-vest-ment." She groaned. "Do you have a vest-ed interest in it?" Louder groan. "When you take it off are you di-vest-ing yourself of it?" Ran from the room.

Beyond the pun-ishment, I began to wonder: Are these words really related? A quick search of the American Heritage Dictionary reveals that they are. All these words -- "vest," "vestment," "vested," "invest" and "divest" -- derive from the Latin word for "clothing." Together they form a kind of cognate cluster, a group of words that share a common origin, but which may lose that connection in the popular mind over time.

I can't remember what I had for breakfast, but I can remember the day 30 years ago that I met Steve Lovelady for the first time. It was April 10, 1978, at a convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE). The title of the panel was "Can Writing Be Taught?" and it would be my debut as the writing coach of the St. Petersburg Times.

I remember how impressed I was by Steve's opening remarks, which were recorded and published as part of the record of the convention. Upon the news of Steve's death on Sunday, I ran to the Poynter library and got my hands on the volume of convention "proceedings" and read what Steve had to say.

That little speech encapsulated everything I would learn about Steve over the next three decades. His work as an editor at The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer (where he helped turn the investigative team of Barlett and Steele into a two-headed legend), and Time Inc. put into practice those remarks from back in the day...