When I write, especially for publication, I try to follow Donald Murray’s advice to make every story a workshop. If I’m not learning, if I’m not growing as a writer, if I’m not moving my craft a quarter of an inch, I might as well go back to coaching a girls soccer team.
So when I began the story that became “Her Picture in My Wallet,” I knew it was a tale that would test my ingenuity. I had a big story – of love and war – revealed through the life of a single character, Tommy Carden. After chatting with him for months and then engaging him in a series of formal interviews, I thought I had a special opportunity. In my original conception – and first full draft – I moved back and forth between one soldier’s memories and a more formal portrayal of American history.
My narrative models were the Frank Capra movies and documentaries from the 1940s. I imagined God’s view of Tommy’s birth or the Invasion of Normandy, as if I were holding a great camera in the sky pointing down to Earth as some grand stage. This was hard to do, especially the scenes in which I tried to place Tommy’s experiences in historical context. How do you render D-Day or the liberation of Buchenwald in a few paragraphs?
My original draft was organized around passages such as this:
“We search for one human being, one single soldier out of almost 35,000 Americans who would land on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. If this were a movie, a camera in the sky would seek him out. As we descend from the clouds and haze – the weather is bad the morning of June 6, 1944, – we see squadrons of fighter planes flying below us at about 3,000 feet above the English Channel. It’s as if they are creating a protective shield for the transport ships below. It is hard to see the vessels through the clouds, but there they are, six thousand of them or more, like a great school of predatory fish, waiting to strike. They are at war already, not with the enemy, but with heavy winds that are blowing waves up to six feet high.”
Two editors came to visit me to talk about the story: Neil Brown, managing editor of the St. Petersburg Times, and Richard Bockman, a Times feature editor who had guided me through other stories. An hour’s conversation yielded mixed results. Both were enthusiastic about the story but not the way I had rendered it. Bockman thought the historical context was “too generic.” And Brown surprised me with the opinion that the story was not daring enough, that he hoped we could try something truly different, perhaps writing it in Tommy’s voice.
IT IS NOT OFTEN THAT EDITORS ENCOURAGE me to charge ahead. More often, I’m being reined in, at least a little. So it took me a couple of days to make sense of their criticism. I thought of how much I liked the draft I had already written, how hard it would be to give up my favorite passages, and how long it might take to rewrite the story stem to stern. That light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be another tunnel. A conversation with Donald Murray seemed to confirm the editors’ opinion.
“You tried to provide the context,” said the war veteran, “but soldiers never have any context.”
That confirmation gave me the confidence to try writing the story in another voice. I sat down without reference to notes and typed about 1,000 words in Tommy’s voice. It began: “My mother liked to tell the story that on the night I was born my father celebrated by marching up and down the street in the snow, singing and banging on a drum. I’m sure he must have had a toddy or two.”
I showed the text to Poynter chief Jim Naughton, who knows Tommy well, and asked him if it, “sounded like Tommy.” He said it did but introduced the idea that I had overdone it, that it sounded, in essence, too much like Tommy. It took me a while to figure out what that meant.
Jim’s critique was enough encouragement to move ahead, and in several days I produced a new draft. I showed Richard Bockman some passages, and he was eager to see more, which is always a good sign. As I began using Tommy’s voice, I was forced, in a productive way, to focus the story through his point of view. He could only narrate what he had seen or heard. The beneficial effect was to evaporate the “generic” historical background my editors had complained of.
As I revised and improved the original draft, I learned a few things of what it means to write in someone else’s voice:
- It helped to begin by overdoing it, the way a visual artist draws a caricature. Only by exaggerating distinctive features of speech could I render them – and then pull back from them.
- For example, Tommy often speaks in catch phrases, repeated in almost every conversation. He’ll say: “God bless that woman,” or “I’ll never forget that man,” or “I cried like a baby.” If a writer used these as often as Tommy spoke them, they would clot the text, obstructing the flow of narrative and distracting the reader. This is a case in which a little flavoring goes a long way. Imagine if the passage above had been written this way: “My father, God bless that man, must have had a toddy or two, but he was an Irishman after all.” Now imagine sentence after sentence reading that way. Instead, I took the most distinctive phrase, “a toddy or two,” and let it echo Tommy’s authentic voice.
- One easy test applied to the text had to do with the level of vocabulary. It sounds obvious, but it is not easy to write a story using only the words that another person would speak. I could dip into transcripts of interviews, of course, but the best strategy, by far, was reading passages out loud to Tommy. In some cases his laughter or commentary revealed that I had hit the mark. At other times, I clearly missed, but he added something that was better than my imitation. This back and forth made us more than source and reporter, but not quite co-authors. (As I re-read the text now, I see some places where it sounds more like me than Tommy. Some readers, who know us both, have made a similar observation.)
- To achieve a level of authenticity, we had to emphasize the saltiness of Tommy’s speech. I’ve not heard Tommy swear often, if you discount the phrase ” dumb ass.” He can tell detailed stories about visits to brothels without ever using a word that Sister Mary Jane would disapprove of. As a result, we were able to get some things in a “family newspaper” that were normally considered “out of bounds.” In fact, we could shove a howitzer up Hitler’s ass, and have not a single reader complain about that line. In fact, it would probably be unpatriotic to do so. To have censored these elements would have flattened the voice and made it seem less “real.”
While I was writing Tommy’s story, an essay of mine was published in a journal called Creative Nonfiction (Volume 16, pp. 3-15). In that piece, I try to draw a firm line between fact and fiction, arguing that the contract between writer and reader should never be broken, that writers should not add to the story things that did not happen, nor should they deceive the reader.
MY EXPERIMENT IN VOICE THREATENED to shatter my own standards. To avoid this violation, Bockman and I worked hard on the “prologue,” written in my own voice. This brief opening introduced Tommy to the readers and explained that he was telling it and that I was writing it. Many messages from inside and outside the newsroom have praised the technique. To date, no one has criticized it.
Writing in another’s voice is a common technique in the world of book publishing. Many “autobiographies” of athletes and celebrities are the work of ghostwriters, many who are no longer invisible, but who get credit on the cover. For example, the late baseball great Mickey Mantle collaborated over time with several sportswriters, each of whom rendered, with some success, Mantle’s distinctive Oklahoma way of speaking. Everyone knows that Mickey was not sitting for days at his typewriter. Given the acceptance of this technique for books, I wonder why it is so unusual in newspapers.
In the 1940s, the Chicago Daily News wrote a series of sports stories titled “My Greatest Day in Baseball,” which were eventually collected in a book I read as a boy. The voices of Babe Ruth and Leo Durocher came through like snaps of lightning, the work of skillful sports writers. I’m sure several of these accounts were “made up” by the writers without regard to the standards we now hold as responsible. But those voices have stuck with me over the decades, and I continue to “listen” to them on occasion. Perhaps it could be said that the seed for the Tommy Carden story was planted when I was 10 years old, needing only four decades to yield fruit.
I began by stating my affection for Donald Murray’s notion of making every story a workshop. I have the unfortunate tendency to want to turn every experiment into a trend. If I’ve written a serial narrative, I want to inspire a hundred more. It’s happening again, and I can’t stop myself. I’m starting to wonder what it would be like to write in the voice of a twelve-year old boy, or an Alzheimer’s patient, or a teacher of the deaf.
Maybe the technique, which requires hard technical work, can be used to help the writer get out of the way, so that the unique and distinctive voices of the American people can be heard loud and clear.
