Writing to Deadline

The first sentence

Pulitzer Prize winner and journalist Donald Murray knows the instant when he has ‘found’ his news column. It is that “surprising moment” when the first sentence materializes in the mind’s eye. Morsels of tension, conflict, irony, or discovery that compels his journalistic nose to follow.

These leading sentences, however, aren’t a product of spontaneous inspiration. They’re usually too “flabby”, too “dull”, too “mechanical”, or too “predictable” to make the cut. Murray says that he may sample more than seventy first sentences to find a good enough line for his article—something quick, appropriate, simple, and honest.

More than that, the lead “is a contract with the reader”, writes Murray in his book Writing to Deadline. That first sentence is a promise to the reader, an invitation for him or her to continue. Just as well, it “tells the writer how to write the story.” It gives focus, order, and voice to everything that follows.

“What’s so hard about the first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.”
Joan Didion in The Art of Fiction (1978). The Paris Review.

Pyramids, rivers, and order

Of course, the lead is just the beginning. Writers must squeeze order from chaos to find the logical progression of ideas that ties the start, the end, and everything in between together.

Murray himself likes to picture the shape of his stories—“a sort of map of the territory ahead.” Most journalists and newspapers, for instance, default to an inverted pyramid where the most compelling items come first.

But order can take all manner of shapes and sizes. Editorials and feature stories may desire a traditional pyramid, in which the author builds layer by layer into a crescendo. Perhaps the story demands a cross-pattern. Here, the anecdote comes first, then the context, then the piece itself. In more playful explorations, the writing may flow and form like “a meandering river.”

Finding the right order requires an ear for the essence of your story and its ideas. The writer, you see, works with an overabundance of inventory. The trick is to focus on a “dominant meaning”. We otherwise risk dilution and confusion by saying too much. To solve for order and organization, we should take the time to stack, restack, and cull as we see fit.

“Writing is a constant process of selection. The effective story can be told by the amount of good material you toss in the wastebasket.”
Donald Murray. (2000). Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work.

Seek surprise and cross-connections

When people ask Murray how long it takes him to put a seven-hundred word column together, he says around thirty to forty minutes. Impressive, no? Well, that’s just the time he spends at the computer. The more honest answer, he admits, is “a week’s worth of hours.”

After all, “the most important writing is done away from the writing desk, when [our] unconscious and subconscious are playing with the subject.” Great writers are forever rehearsing in their heads, seeking surprise and cross-connections that others are yet to see.

A day in the life with Murray is full of brainstorming, mindmapping, and journaling. He is often taking inventory of what he sees, reading outside his interests, trying new hobbies, and clipping pictures and headlines that intrigue him. The goal, he says, is to always be adding, weaving, and rearranging to “see what connects.”

“In exploring the world, a writer should also look for what isn’t there as much as what is, hear the unsaid as well as the said, imagine what might be.”
Donald Murray. (2000). Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work.

Read for meaning, structure, and language

On the topic of process, Murray will read and revise his draft a minimum of three times. First, he reads fast for meaning. He wants to see if the dominant meaning rings true. Then he’ll read again, but more slowly. He inspects the structure for integrity and logical progression. In both stages, he asks and answers the questions that his readers might ponder along the way.

“A story should move well, like an actor on stage. Put another way, it should be a chain, rather than a stack, of facts… Good assembly for me is largely a matter of revision.”
David Mehegan in Donald Murray. (2000). Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work.

Once he’s satisfied, he reads again, this time even more slowly. He goes word-by-word, line-by-line, adding, cutting, and correcting for “accuracy, clarity, and grace.” Tuning, he says, is tricky, as we “deal with layer upon layer of concern.” Are the words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs harmonizing in concert? It helps, he says, to write and read aloud, to give ear to voice, rhythm, and cadence.

“I still read everything aloud. I have a fundamental conviction that if a sentence cannot be read aloud with sincerity, conviction, and communicable emphasis, it is not a good sentence… [It] is the easiest way to see that prose tracks, that it runs on smoothly from sentence to sentence, idea to idea, section to section within the larger whole.”
Richard Marius in Donald Murray. (2000). Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work.

The architecture of lively writing

When it comes to lively writing, Murray reminds us that it was Ernest Hemingway who said that “prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” Too often, writers find themselves lost in a sea of adjectives and adverbs when the verb will do. Like a good fencer, words and phrases must strike with intent.

Stephen King shows us, likewise, in his Memoir of the Craft, that even simple noun-verb constructions like “plums deify” can have poetic weight. Jobless words and passive constructions are signs of an unsure writer. Indeed, everyday writing should not be an enigma. We leave that to the physicists who work on quantum field theory. As William Zinsser says, writing is “talking to someone else on paper.” Above all, it is a “personal transaction… [that craves] clarity, simplicity, brevity, and humanity.”

“Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. … Look for clutter and prune it ruthlessly.”
William Zinsser. (1976). On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.

Never a day without a line

There are times, however, when the inner critic feels as though that everything that sputters onto the page is odious. The writer gives into despair and questions why she is even writing at all. Murray understands and recalls the many times when “everything [he] wrote seemed best described by the Old English word dung.”

But it is important to remember that writers are less like surgeons and more like oil painters. They are forever wedded to the process of discovery and layering. If we persist, Murray assures us that “rewriting and editing stops feeling like failure and becomes a central satisfaction of our craft.”

If you’re procrastinating or feeling paralyzed, that’s too bad. Like any other job in life, you have to get on with it. Murray himself was “saved from permanent literary constipation by economic necessity.” He does not wake up every morning eager to write his next word. He simply drags himself to his desk and writes. As Pliny the Elder prescribes in Naturalis Historia, “nulla dies sine linea” (“never a day without a line”). “Habit”, Murray adds, is “more important than talent.”

Of course, writing is daunting work, overwhelming even. From leads to order to voice, there’s much to balance. Even lifelong writer and activist Gloria Steinem says that the blank page remains the one thing that scares her to this day.

How then do the great writers do it? Murray’s advice here is as blunt as it is succinct: “have a deadline”. “Writing is too serious a business to be taken seriously.” And life is too short to curl-up after every misfire. When it comes to writing, we have to learn to enjoy every surprise, every delight, and every stumble that comes our way.

“Many writers whimper and whine about how hard it is to write. They should go into real estate. Writing—and any other craft that presumes to be art—should be play more than work.”
Donald Murray. (2000). Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work.

Sources and further reading

Murray, Donald. (2000). Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work.
King, Stephen. (2000). On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
Zinsser, William. (1976). On Writing Well: The Classic guide to Writing Nonfiction.