You know those songs that just get you? Leave you sitting there frozen -- eyes watering, skin covered in goosebumps?
That was me Saturday. At the National Writers' Workshop, of all places.
I
had come to learn the secrets of better writing. Instead, I was
listening to a 20-year-old singer/songwriter from St. Louis. Her sad,
smooth voice rolled along with soft chords from the piano in the back
of the room:
In the year of the yellow cab
Shadow of the great world war
The third kid grandmom had
Came into this world
On a rolling farm in Maryland
When Wilson was the president
As summer blew her goodbye through the trees
But Dick Weiss, a writing coach for WeissWrite LLC, says we can learn how to write better, just from listening to these lyrics.
"75 Septembers," by
Cheryl Wheeler -- sung and played by
Phoebe Claggett for the workshop -- gets its power in simplicity, he says.
A child of changing times
Growing up between the wars
Fords rolled off the lines
And bars all closed their doors
and I imagine you back then
With snap brim hat and farmer's tan
Where horses drew their wagons through the fields
So few words. So much information.
Notice how Wheeler leaves out specific dates and eras, Weiss says. She uses images, instead.
The song also never uses the name of Wheeler's father.
We probably couldn't get away with that it in the newspaper, Weiss says. But we can keep names out of the lede.
One great example -- Walt Harrington's "Against the Tide," which ran in the
Washington Post Magazine in 1992:
A
man goes 22 years without being afraid, without giving his own death a
glance, without worrying that the map of the city's criminal ways and
rhythms that he has always carried in his head might be obsolete. A man
goes 22 years climbing the ladder from beat cop to blue-boy elite, to
homicide detective. A man goes 22 years to earn a reputation as a
'90er' -- a detective who puts the souls of nearly all his victims to
rest by closing the book on their murders. A man goes 22 years, and
then the waters he inhabits shift and roil with unpredictable currents,
until murder isn't murder anymore, isn't a biblical sentence that
friends and lovers and fathers and sons impose on each other in storms
of rage and recrimination. A man goes 22 years and finds himself
leaning casually over a corpse on Halley Terrace in Southeast
Washington, D.C., about to be made aware. That man -- Detective Victor
'V.I.' Smith -- flips back the dead man's coat and sees a blue-black
machine gun, an Uzi, cocked and ready to fire.
Start with the tension. Insert clunky details later.
What about the song's description of Wheeler's father? Snap brim hat and farmer's tan. Not very complete.
But it's distinct, and it's universal, one journalist argued.
"What I found is a little bit goes a long way," Weiss says. Readers like using their imagination to fill in the rest.
Now the fields are all four lanes
and the moon's not just a name
Are you more amazed at how things change
Or how they stay the same
And do you sit here on this porch and wonder
How the time flies by
Or does it seem to barely creep along
With 75 Septembers come and gone
Have I forgotten the majority of newspaper articles I've read in my life? Sadly, yes.
Will
I forget how I felt listening to this song, remembering my grandfather?
And how much impact writing can have with a universal theme? I'm
arguing no.
