This third entry in an occasional series from Roy Peter Clark, who witnessed the Poynter Institute’s founding, explores its history in honor of its 50th anniversary.
It would be hard to estimate how many talented writing teachers have over 50 years walked the halls of the Poynter Institute.
One of them towers above them all. No, not me. I am a disciple, not the anointed one. If you have ever attended one of my workshops or read one of my books, you know the powerful influence of a writer and writing coach named Donald M. Murray.
“A page a day equals a book a year.”
“Good writing is not magic — it’s a process.”
“Shorter words, sentences, and paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity.”
Just three of the countless gems Don Murray shared over decades with reporters in newsrooms and students in college classrooms.
A paratrooper in World War II, a Pulitzer Prize editorial writer in his 20s, a great reformer in the teaching of college composition in his 40s, a columnist and writing coach at The Boston Globe in his 60s, Murray wore suspenders with the strength and size of bungee cords. At conferences, he could enter a room like a Scottish Santa, followed by a wave of attentive elves — including me.
In 1977, Eugene Patterson hired me to be a writing coach at the St. Petersburg Times. In a parallel move, the Globe hired Murray. I was 29 and had never set foot in a newsroom before. Murray was almost twice my age but treated me like the expert. He did two things that shocked me: He asked me questions, and he listened. “Good editors perform an unnatural act,” he would say. “They listen.”
In 1981, I began running weeklong writing workshops at what was then the Modern Media Institute in a small converted bank building in downtown St. Pete. Each seminar had 15 participants from different news organizations and three visiting experts. That number, 18, was not strategic, it was just all we could fit around the trapezoidal seminar table. The size and dimensions of that table would shape the Poynter experience for decades.
It may have been 1983 when Murray came to teach at a writing seminar. He handed out a single piece of paper. On it, he had drawn a modest outline: six words, pointing in a downhill diagonal, connected by arrows. Something like this:
Don described this as his model of the writing process, a series of rational steps that create the work that, at its best, feels magical to the reader. There was a kind of Platonic Universality to Murray’s model, the idea that every writer, in every genre, for all of recorded history, must solve the same set of problems:
- What will I write about?
- What stuff will I need to write it?
- What, at its center, will it be about?
- What shape will it take?
- What will the first version look like?
- How will I make it better?
Each of the key words in his model had a set of tools associated with it. How do you find and express a FOCUS? Maybe with a title or headline, a lead sentence, a nut paragraph, a thesis statement, a set of questions, a great quote, and so on.
All the faculty members at Poynter who would teach writing would, one way or another, have to account for Murray’s model, each of us adding, subtracting, revising, tinkering with strategies and tools that writers would find useful and motivational.
I probably have taught at least a half-dozen versions. My favorite one looks like this:
We kept this model pointing downhill with the psychological benefit of making the process look easier. But we attended to Murray’s caution that the writing process was not linear but, to use a mathematical term, recursive. That meant that if you were stuck, you could find the solution by going backward. If you could not figure out what material to select from your notebook, you could go back and sharpen the focus. And revision was not just proofreading: You could go back and improve all steps in the process. You could even revise your revisions.
The model was great for editors or teachers. They could use it as a kind of rubric to assess the skills learned by writers over time. Or it could be used to help figure out at what stage of the process the writer was stuck — with coaching on what to do next.
It’s fair to say that Murray’s process approach was so powerful and influential that we borrowed the word “process” for other disciplines:
- The process of ethical decisionmaking
- The process of how writers, editors and designers work together
- And now: a process for using artificial intelligence responsibly
I dedicated my most influential book, “Writing Tools,” to Donald Murray and his wife Minnie Mae Murray, godparents to a nation of writers.
Don had a chance to read the book in 2006, just months before he passed away. In our last phone call, he said, “I know what you are trying to do.” And he did: help preserve his wisdom for generations of writers to come.
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