Donald Murray, author of our textbook "Writing to Deadline" and columnist for The Boston Globe," died at the end of last year. He was 82.
Here's what I want you to do:
1. Read Murray's obituary in The Globe and the last few columns he wrote, which are still available on the newspaper's website. (Talk about a guy who kept going right up to the end. He turned in his last column on a Friday, he died Saturday and the column appeared in Tuesday's paper.) Pay special attention to his last column, headlined "Friends' caring, sharing shows the way," and the column headed "Finding pleasure in the challenge of a blank sheet" that ran Dec. 26.
2. Write an answer to the following question(s) and post to your blog. (Especially if you're not used to blogging yet, I would recommend drafting your answers in Microsoft Word and copy-and-pasting them to the blog. If you post links, see this important *warning at the bottom of the page. If you're not posting links yet, it'll just confuse you. That's why I'm putting it at the bottom like an old-fashioned footnote.) Here's the question:
Donald Murray was 82 years old when he did. Is there anything in his last few columns that you can learn from in your own career as a professional writer?No right answers here, although I do want you to think about these columns and see if there's anything in them you can use in your own writing. You all have different goals, and different ways of writing, so you'll get different things out of the columns and/or the obituary ... something he says about writing and the craft of writing, the way he handled his career, the way he writes, his style, word choices, etc., whatever. It's up to you, but I think he'll have something to say to all of us as writers.
An example: If I were doing this exercise, I might post a blog on the way he kept churning out columns in old age when life was obviously getting difficult for him and he had a good excuse to just sit back and not put in the effort, but clearly it was important to him to keep meeting deadlines. His daughter said something about how he lived through his writing. But I also like what he said about people might think he's stupid (although I seriously doubt anybody really did), but he could work harder. And it blows me away his last column was thanking his friends for being there for him. Did he know it was going to be his last?
No wrong answers, either. Although "die young and leave a good-looking corpse" might come close to being one.
* Warning footnote on hypertext links. Here's something I found out the hard way: If you type out hypertext -- that stuff that goes "a href equal-sign quote" you used to link to your blogs -- in Microsoft Word, Bill @#$&ing Gates will put "curly quotes" in automatically, and Blogger won't know what to do with them. I just put x's in the draft and type in the hypertext later in Blogger.
2 comments:
Also posted on my blog...not sure if I needed t post here as well.
After reading only his obituary and his last column, I have gained a deep respect for Mr. Donald M. Murray. I'm sure there are a countless number of things I could learn from his writings. However, the one thing I take away from today's reading is the amazing heart and soul he put into his writings. He wore his heart on his sleeve when it came to writing. He wrote about real life situations that he went through, and the feelings he experienced throughout those situations. The two experiences he wrote about in his last column were very sad, unfortunate ones, that most people wouldn't want to discuss, let alone write a column about, knowing that thousands would read it. Murray wanted to share his feelings with the world, in order to express the learnings he gained throughout his unfortunate experiences. His readings were enjoyable because they were real. His love for writing is extremely apparent, but his talent for writing proved to be even more apparent. The one thing I take away from Mr. Murray's writings is the method of writing meant to touch the hearts of everyday people.
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