I enjoy writers who take full advantage of the space on the page, giving equal weight to the markings and the emptiness. I remember a piece from long ago that started something like: "To understand the relative size of the planet to its sun, think of the sun as the size of the whole front page, and the planet as smaller than the period that ends this sentence."
Poets are best at this. They can measure the long lines of text and the short ones. They can see where the white space will fall. Unlike prose writers, they know where the line will end.
Some of the most famous poets of the 17th century wrote poems in the shape of the thing they described, such as a cross, an altar, or a pyramid. One of my favorites,
George Herbert, used this method to create such poems as
"Easter Wings." Here’s the first stanza, in the shape of a wing:
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more
Till he became
Most poor:
With Thee
O let me rise
As larks harmoniously,
And sing this day Thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
It's fun to notice how Herbert adjusts the length of the line to reflect its meaning, so that "Most poor" is the shortest, and "rise" announces lengthening.
So, you might ask, can you actually use such visual techniques in the text of a journalism story? My answer is yes... yes... yes... YES!
One of my favorite examples comes from my pal Jeff Elder, writing about the extinction of the passenger pigeon:
In 1800, there were 5 billion in North America. They were in such abundance that the new technology of the Industrial Revolution was enthusiastically employed to kill them. Telegraphs tracked their migration. Enormous roosts were gassed from trees while they slept. They were shipped to market in rail car after rail car after rail car.
More than one reader has noticed how that last sentence looks like a railroad train.
Now consider the story by
Dan Barry, discussed recently here in another context, which describes the fortunate descent of a young child out of a sixth story window.
This boy who had been born three months premature, weighing barely three pounds. This boy who had so defied the odds that at 23 months he weighed 30 pounds, big enough to be mistaken for a 3-year-old. This boy falling.
Past the fifth floor.
Past the fourth.
Past the third, falling so fast you'd have seen only a babyish blur.
Past the second.
Past the first.
Past the ground level lobby.
All told, past six windows, each one featuring a window guard.
There you have it, part of a newspaper column that looks like a six-story building. To use such a strategy requires the writer to occupy the text as if it were a landscape, to imagine words arranged on a page, to almost feel the letters with your hands, as if they were made of clay.
