LEAVING SOME UNUSED WORDS ON THE TABLE I’d like to thank you, Mansuetude for a very provocative question. First, I appreciate anyone who notices my attempt to budget words and sentences. It also gives me a chance to reflect a bit on the connection between mind and fingers and screen (or paper, if anyone uses it anymore).
Writing broadcast news is a constant mental game. I look at the facts of a story, then I try to think of a way I can clearly tell the listener about it. Then, before I start to write , I work the words through my mind and try to eliminate anything that might interrupt that connection between the radio speaker and the human ear.
Some writers are like aerobatic pilots who like to spin and turn and swoop the readers through a story. With my paucity of words, I try to take things nice and smooth and in a straight line from place-to-place in the newscast. I like to leave words on the table. I wouldn’t be very good at scrabble.
I can look at a broadcast news script and tell you if it is going to be an easily understood piece, or a story that leads the listener through twists and turns and dependent phrases and prepositional doodley-dads to an ambiguous end. Good broadcast copy looks pretty. It’s clean. Listeners know where they are headed as they participate in the communication process. Is my way the be-all, and end-all? No. Because one of the main rules of strong writing, is break the rules sometimes.
My personal letters and journal entries have a clipped style that would probably drive my college English teachers crazy. But there are times when I turn it off, and allow deeper and more complex thoughts to roll around in my mind. Thoughts like family, and friends, and love, and eternity. But even though those thoughts are in complex spider web connections inside my head, I’m sometimes guilty of editing even those thoughts before they are spoken- even to myself.
The world is not black and white. It is an infinitely varying gray scale. My job is to pick out just which gray we’re talking about. And make you see that same gray in your mind.
My dogs are just happy to be around, and would settle for a scritch on the head. But I confess, they probably hear a lot more from me than they might enjoy at times.
My wife and family have long accepted me for what I am, and that is a lot more complex person than the news that I write.
And as for my conversations with God- sometimes they are only a cry to His name, because the words won’t come, no matter how many stories I have churned out. And after all, He knows the story anyway.
