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Fiction: Love Song

(This story was written for an alternate realities compilation at flashquake for which I had no better ideas and it will mean nothing if you're not familiar with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. If you're not familiar with Prufrock, forget my trifle and go here and read it at once.)

Prufrock stood in his boxers, dejectedly staring into the mirror above his bathroom sink.

"There will be time," he said. "There will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet."

"Aren't you ready yet?" his wife called.

"In a minute," Prufrock replied and then muttered softly, "In a minute there is time, for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

"Are you trying to weasel out of this again?" his wife demanded.

"That is not it, at all,” he responded. “That is not what I meant at all."

Prufrock emptied the water from the basin and wondered if the mermaids would ever sing for him as he absent-mindedly fingered his folded clothes.

"I grow old, I grow old," he mumbled. "I wear the bottoms of my Dockers rolled."

He stroked his thinning hair and tongued a loose denture.

"Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?"

"Dammit, Alf," his wife scolded. "Enough with the angst already. Put on some pants and forget the comb-over of your hair. Just wear your Red Sox cap. We're late for senior aerobics."

Prufrock sighed. " Do I dare disturb the universe?"

On writing: Make your words strike a chord

(In a previous post, I mentioned an old article on news writing I wrote for Quill and several people asked me to post it here. This appeared in the October 1999 issue of Quill.)

Any reporter who takes writing seriously has a tale about a run-in with a cranky old editor who, when challenged on changes to a story, grumbled, "This ain't  poetry we're creating here."

These stories are told with disdain at writers workshops gaining popularity around the country.

I cheer the writing movement and it's goal of using techniques from literature and the fine arts to add life to the words we put on our pages. I applaud the journalists who turn out by the hundreds to these workshops, hungry to improve their skills. My newspaper gave four reporters and two editors full rides to National Writers Workshops in Portland and Orange County this year alone.

But I worry that when we define ourselves first as "writers" rather than journalists or reporters — as though it’s somehow more prestigious — we're turning newspaper writing into something pretentious.

There are times when the cranky old editor in me wants to shout out,  "Hey, this still ain't poetry we're creating here!"  For that matter, it ain't Bach, either.

This struck me on the flight back from a writers workshop on the West Coast featuring a keynote address by Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute entitled, "What I Learned About Writing From Playing in a High School Band."

Clark used music as a metaphor for writing, punctuating his points with piano and voice renditions of everything from rock classics to John Philip Sousa to the "Beer Barrel Polka." It was entertaining and effective. Clark had the assembled newshounds dancing in the aisles.

I was in awe of the guy. He's one of the best writers and teachers of writing in the business. It wasn't fair that he could sing and play the piano, too. Heck, you could put him in center field for the Yankees and he'd probably lead the American League in batting.

As much as I enjoyed the presentation, it left me wondering how Clark's finer points about the sound, rhythm and pace of writing really relate to the bulk of what we do.

When a reporter expounds to me about the “voice” of a bungled story under discussion, I often find myself answering, "Yeah, let's untangle your lede first to give our readers just a tiny clue of what you're trying to say and then we'll worry about your voice."

The issue became clear that afternoon when Clark was doing another session on "The Craft of Honest Reporting." He offered reporters sound advice about how to avoid "f---ing your careers" by straying from the truth in the manner of Patricia Smith of the Boston Globe — once a popular speaker at writers' workshops.

In exploring the gray areas journalists face, he read the beginning of a beautifully written story about a woman who had been convicted of murder. The story started with a rich monologue quoting the woman in her regional colloquialisms on why she had killed.

It was powerful, but Clark wondered if the group had a problem with the fact that, while the words were the woman's, they hadn't been spoken in exactly the order written but had been spliced together. Many didn't have a problem with it.

Clark asked if they had a problem given the further information that the quotes presented as a monologue didn't come from a single interview at all, but from sessions over several days. He asked us to talk it over with the people seated next to us.

Clark clearly had a problem with it and so did I. To avoid having to answer credibility-busting questions about why you're playing fast and loose, I believe that when in doubt it's always best to disclose to readers what you're doing. If, when challenged, you can’t convincingly explain your reason for departing from accepted conventions in 25 words or less, you lose.

I suggested to the people next to me that the writer could have solved the problem by working in a sentence that said: "This is the woman's story in her own words, taken from interviews over several days.”

"That would break up the flow," one young reporter said. "You heard what he told us this morning about how important the rhythm of a story is."

"The truth is more important than the rhythm," I said.

The guy, who had a couple of years experience at some 20,000-circulation daily, looked at me like I was Ringo to his Lennon, unworthy of further response.

It pointed up how getting too fixed on the writing side of the equation can pervert what we do. The nobility of our profession is in seeking truth and reporting it, not in making words sing and dance. Excellent writing is a powerful tool in reporting the truth, as long as we remember that writing isn’t the goal but a means of achieving truth.

To find the truth, we need to master the basics of good news writing, a topic that doesn’t come up often enough at the workshops. Many conferees who think they already have gained such mastery flatter themselves. There's a lot of bad writing in our newspapers in which rhythm and flow are the least concern.

Tiger Woods had to spend thousands of hours learning to hit straight before he could think about curving the golf ball with his power fade — especially in competition. Too many of our promising young writers are going for the trick shots before they put in their time on the driving range.

Toward the end of his musical presentation, Clark spoke about the importance of understanding the basic chord structure that underlies the music. He demonstrated how songs as diverse as "Louie, Louie," "Hang on Sloopy" and "True Lovin'" are based on the same progression of three chords.

Perhaps the solution is to push this issue a little higher in the discussion. After all, Copland couldn’t compose his masterpiece "Appalachian Spring" until he understood how the unassuming Shaker hymn "Simple gifts" was put together. Perhaps the writers workshops need to spend a little more time on the simple gifts and how far they can carry us in creating our Appalachian Springs.

Hitting the keyboard

Please don’t ask me to show you on the piano, but here’s my take on the underlying chord structure of news writing.

You can make your way through the majority of blues, rock and folk music with various combinations of Clark’s three chords, each of which is made up of three notes.

Similarly, I see nine essential “notes” of good news writing. Virtually every well-written story, whether an 8-inch brief on a warehouse fire, a feature on the latest fashion trend or a three-part series on our China policy, is built on the notes of accuracy, focus, impact, context, organization, depth, people, fairness and style.

You’ll protest, “You’re telling me nothing new. This is Journalism 101. I already know this stuff.”

But knowing it isn’t enough. You have to have these basic notes so ingrained in your writing that you use them in every story as a matter of habit. Only then will your true writer’s voice ring clear. Let’s look at these notes in more detail:

• Accuracy. The story is correct in every respect and presented without ambiguity. If we fail at this, nothing else matters.

When you pay good money to hear a professional musician play, you expect the music to be performed competently. If the musician hits a lot of sour notes, you’ll leave the concert with a very sour taste.

Our readers expect the same competence from us. Every fact that’s wrong, every misspelling, every bit of botched grammar, every typo drives readers to ask, “If they can’t get that right, how can we believe anything they say?” If we’re not credible to readers, they have no use for us.

All news writing begins with the reporting. Just as a song is built on notes, our stories are built on accurate facts, succinct quotes and telling details. If you don't have these in your notebook before you sit down at the keyboard, all the fancy writing in the world won't bail you out.

• Focus. The story makes one main point that clearly tells readers what the story is about. The rest of the story is devoted to developing and backing up the main point.

While the great composers can get away with changing keys in the middle of a work, most tunes are in one key. A song that starts in the key of C will keep coming back to C.

Similarly, every well-written news story makes one main point and keeps coming back to that. It’s the focal point from which we build. Every paragraph in the story must advance the main point in some way.

For instance, if your main point is, “Three people died in a two-car collision on Highway 1 yesterday,” the story would take a far different path than if the main point were, “County negligence in engineering and maintenance was directly responsible for the fatal accident yesterday on Highway 1.”

The worst writing disasters occur when you type cluelessly, hoping to discover your main point along the way. Readers won’t stick around to find out how your fumbling ends. Jot down your main point in one sentence before you start writing. It’ll serve nicely as a straight lede if you can't come up with anything better.

Focusing a clear main point from the start makes for stories that seem to write themselves. It’s the single best way to improve your writing. Find C and keep bringing the story back to C.

• Impact. The story dwells on how the news impacts readers instead of the process that led to the impact.

Have you ever been to a concert where the performer introduced each song with a rambling explanation of how the ditty came to him? I want to scream, “Just shut up and sing already!”

Our readers feel the same way about many of our stories. We need to know the inner workings of the institutions we cover to fully understand and report their actions. But we mustn’t dump every bit of information we know into our stories just because we went to the trouble of gathering it.  

We find the political and bureaucratic processes that produce the news far more interesting than our readers do. Information about process sometimes is relevant to the news, but the process rarely is the news.

This is impact: “The average homeowner’s property tax will go up $100 a year as a result of the 3-percent increase passed by the City Council last night.”

This is process: “A 3-percent property tax increase passed by the City Council last night was the culmination of months of bitter Council infighting.”

Write the impact. If your readers wanted to know all the bloody nuances of the Council infighting, they would hang around City Hall themselves. Instead they pay you 50 cents to attend the meetings for them and cut to the bottom line.

• Context. The story is quickly put into clear perspective and provides sufficient background to help the reader understand the news and why it matters.

Many newspaper stories remind me of the song "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall." They go on pointlessly and endlessly, unfixed in time or space.

Day after day, the headlines these stories inspire tell readers that nothing new, important or interesting has happened: "NATO unsure on ground troops for Kosovo." "Allies continue to ponder ground troops." "Ground troops still an option — possibly."

Our job as journalists is not only to give our readers information, but to also give them some clue as to what to make of the information. If we don't, it's of no more value than spam on the Internet, which is already threatening to displace journalism.

Beyond telling readers what happened, we must tell them what's new about it, why it matters, where it fits in with what has passed before and what will come and, of course, its impact on the reader. We must stop telling them at punishing length that nothing happened that was new or of consequence.

Without context, readers might overreact to something that doesn't warrant serious concern or fail to respond to a deadly situation. Or they might turn the page past your story once too often and cancel their subscriptions.

• Organization. The story employs thoughtful organization to carry the reader effortlessly through the story and relate all information back to the main point.

Popular songs are organized in combinations of verses, choruses and bridges. While news stories don’t have to rhyme, there are similar choices we must make about the most effective way to present our information to readers.

If you've got the top of your story set up right — you know your main point and make it clearly, tell the impact, put the news in context and foreshadow key elements to come — the rest should be easy.  It's just a matter of looking at the organizational tools available to you and picking the one that fits your information best.  You're looking for a smooth flow with easy transitions that cause the reader little needless work in getting through the story.

Some stories are best told in chronological order, from beginning to end.  Other stories are told best in reverse chronology. Sometimes, the chronology doesn't matter and it makes more sense to tell your story point by point or issue by issue. Person by person can also be an effective way to spin out a story.

The old inverted pyramid, in which information is given in order of its importance, is still a useful way to tell some news stories. It lets the reader get the most information in the least amount of time according to his or her level of interest.

The key test is that each paragraph must advance the main point in some way. If the information doesn't relate to your main point, either revise the main point to encompass it or throw it out.

• Depth. The story touches base with many sources to assure depth and perspective. A one-source story seldom is acceptable.

The great composers often start with a simple musical theme and explore it from every angle of timing, rhythm and instrumentation, going deeper into the possibilities until they have an intricate treasure. If Pachelbel had stopped with just the basic eight-note theme of his “Canon,” he would have written the baroque equivalent of a radio jingle.

We can’t fill our newspapers with stories as shallow as radio jingles. We must consult enough sources to truly explore all key angles.

How many profiles do you read where the only source consulted is the subject? Naturally, the consensus among those consulted is that the person is wonderful. Trust me, no matter who the subject is there is somebody out there who thinks he or she is a jackass. Even Mother Teresa had critics who thought she was too cozy with a corrupt Indian government.

How many stories do you read about opponents of the governor's budget cuts that don't bother to find those who support the cuts — or even to fully explain why cuts were made? Inevitably you get letters to the editor saying the cuts were the governor's smartest move ever. That opposing view should have been in the story.

The more sources we consult — human and documentary — the less likely we'll miss something that would change the premise of the story and bring us closer to the truth we seek. Make it a practice to always check one more fact or make one extra phone call before turning in a story. You’ll be surprised how often routine stories turn special.

• People. The story exploits all opportunities to show rather than tell its points. It’s told through people affected by the news rather than officials reciting statistics.

Central to the opera "Madame Butterfly" is the story of love betrayed as the Japanese heroine is deserted by her American husband and ultimately driven to suicide.

Suppose that instead of showing the characters playing out this compelling drama, Puccini had instead put a lone player on stage for two hours to tell the audience what happened to the main characters.

That's exactly what we too often do in our news stories. We keep putting boring bureaucrats on stage to tell our readers what happened when we have all these great actors out there ready to show readers what happened in dramatic fashion.

Don't build your story around deputy city housing director Malcolm Smidge saying homelessness is up 3 percent due mainly to an increase in the working poor. Go out and find some working homeless and tell their stories, weaving Smidge's statistics into the drama of their lives.

Don't have the police spokesman saying the mother was devastated by the loss of two of her children in a gang shooting. Show her throwing herself into the arms of her sister and weeping uncontrollably when visiting the scene of the crime.

It's people who make the news, people who are affected by the news and people who read the news. Get people into your stories.

• Fairness. The story lets the facts speak for themselves without hyperbole and allows all parties to a dispute to present their cases fairly.

Good music depends on a clean melody. Jarring, discordant notes spoil the sound. The most discordant news stories are those that are blatantly unfair. Our readers spot them in a second and each one diminishes our credibility.

It’s especially important to truly seek the view of anybody we put in a bad light. It's not enough to leave a message a half-hour before you go home and let the subject deal with your voice mail as the presses roll. Beyond fairness, the subject may have exculpatory information that will knock the legs out from under your story. Would you rather find out your story is wrong before it's in print or after?

Sometimes a subject will duck us. We can't allow sources to censor good information by declining comment. But when we're forced to run one-sided stories, we must explain to our readers in detail the effort we made to get all sides.

Build stories with facts, not loaded words. If your story is full of hype, question your facts. Beware of sentences like, "The sleazy deal had all of the earmarks of a classic scam." Just describe what happened and let others supply the adjectives. Don’t end up on a witness stand being grilled about Mr. Webster’s definition of your loaded words.

Avoid words with unnecessarily negative connotations. Some stories transparently make one side look good and the other bad not on the basis of facts, but by the words the writer chooses. The good guy "says" while the bad guy "claims." The good guy "plans" while the bad guy "schemes." There's a loaded term for such writing: “cheap shot.”

Stay away from unnamed sources unless they’re supplying fact, not opinion, they’re in a position to know, the information is of vital importance, you’re sure the information is right and there’s no other way to get it.

There’s no harm in being generous in giving all sides of a story a fair break. Understand the damage your story could cause and be sure it’s warranted. It’s our job to do the hard story, but there’s no excuse for being just plain mean.

• Style. The story runs on direct sentences with active verbs and is free of unnecessary adverbs, adjectives, qualifiers, redundancies and repetitive quotes. The story conforms to style on every point unless there is a compelling reason to divert.

In music, composers can get away with lines like, "she blew my nose and then she blew my mind," as the Rolling Stones did in "Honky Tonk Woman." We don't have the wailing guitars, pounding drums, thumping basses, gyrating hips and dancing feet to cover up our weak lyrics. We have only our words and every one counts.

So watch the jargon. Don't write in code and don't let quoted sources speak in code. Question every modifier and take the trouble to find the right word. Before using an adverb, look for a verb that more precisely describes the action — "jogs" instead of "runs slowly." Before using an adjective, look for a better noun that encompasses the modifier — "giant" instead of "gargantuan man."

Especially don't turn perfectly good nouns into unnecessary adjectives to modify useless nouns — “freeway project,” “prison facility,” “health status,” “crime problem,” “welfare issue,” “poverty factor.”  Avoid weasel words that rob stories of conviction — "may,"  "possibly," "believed to be," "in memory," "apparently," "somewhat."

Learn proper spelling, grammar and style and don't depend editors to catch all of your mistakes. Scour your writing for opportunities to save words.

Don't feel obligated to quote everybody you interview for a story and don't let sources expound forever on their every thought. While good quotes give life to a story, paraphrase when it makes more sense and use partial quotes judiciously.

Make it a point every day to learn or revisit something about writing from books like Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" or "The AP Guide to News Writing" by Rene Cappon.

Fiction: Richard's Seduction

"Richard, give me your hand," she said.

She thinks it's so easy, he thought. It's been so long since a woman has touched me.

"Richard, I can't help you until you give me your hand," she said.

I'm beyond help, he thought. I'm 43, I've got no family, no friends, a nowhere job.

Everybody thinks I'm gay because I have no woman. I cry myself to sleep wishing I had a woman to love me. Folks say I look good since I've been working out, but I still feel so ugly. I'm so afraid to reach out.

 After Mom died when I was 12, Dad pulled down every shade in the house and never opened them again. Now I live alone in my own dark house with the shades pulled down.

"Richard, why is it so hard for you to give me your hand?"

I used to go out with a woman — Elaine was her name. I took her to fine restaurants and luxury resorts; we stayed in separate rooms, of course. I never asked for sex and she never offered.

People said Elaine took advantage of me. I guess they were right. She kept pushing for more until it got beyond my means, then she said I was too possessive and dumped me. She said she only went out with me because she felt sorry for me. 

"Richard, your hand?"

I'm tired of letting fear rule my life.

"That's how, Richard. Put your hand in mine."

I have to take chances if I want things to change.

"Good, Richard, now squeeze. The needle will only pinch for a second. The doctor should have your cholesterol results by Friday."

Copyright © 2009, David Shapiro. All rights reserved.

On writing: Think accuracy first

Factual accuracy is especially important in news writing and editorial commentary, but it matters in other kinds of writing as well.

Every fact that’s wrong, every misspelling, every bit of botched grammar, every typo drives readers to ask, "If you can’t get that right, how can we believe anything you say?" If we’re not credible to readers, they have no use for us.

I gave exactly this advice in an article on news writing I wrote for Quill magazine. Alas, earlier in the piece I misspelled John Philip Sousa’s name with the "z" used by Portuguese immigrants to Hawaii, which unfortunately, Sousa was not.

Within 10 minutes after the first copy of Quill landed in the first mailbox somewhere in Wisconsin, I got a snide e-mail from a journalism professor informing me of my error. Then another and another and another.

I tried to think up excuses as I rubbed out the sting of insults from gloating backseat editors, but I kept running into my own advice: Don't depend on editors to catch all of your mistakes. Misspelled names are among the toughest mistakes for copy editors to catch.

Factual accuracy is as important in other forms of writing. A woman in a fiction-writing workshop I belonged to posted a bit of erotica about a couple that made a pre-dawn copulatory tour of Washington monuments. Her elegant descriptions were wasted when she got the names of several monuments wrong, misplaced them geographically and laid out a ludicrous timeline.

She had her frisky couple starting out two hours before daybreak from their hotel and stopping to do their thing seven times at monuments on a six-mile walk around the Mall and Tidal Basin. Unless they sprinted faster than Usain Bolt and reloaded quicker than AK-47s, they would have entertained the morning rush hour —  and  possibly the lunch crowd — with their final acts of passion. Not to mention that there are about 17 law enforcement agencies that patrol the area where they cavorted.

Her story got a rise from members of the workshop, but not the kind she expected.

Copyright © 2009, David Shapiro. All rights reserved.

Fiction: First Grief

(Previously published in Mindprints)

Adam Stillwell sat on his den sofa sipping a tall glass of bourbon. He couldn’t get Jasper Craig and the damn Vietnam War out of his mind. Between the two, they had nearly driven him out of the newspaper business before his career even started.

The war was at its peak back then, and he was junior man on the city reporting staff. Every few days, the Army would call to inform the Tribune that another local boy had died in the conflict.

 Jasper Craig, the assistant city editor, would hand Stillwell a note with the soldier's name and instructions to call the family to find out about where the boy went to high school and some of his interests. Stillwell also had to ask if the Trib could send a messenger by to pick up a photo.

God, how he hated those calls. The Army usually informed the newspaper only a short time after notifying the family, and Stillwell’s call would intrude on the first moments of grief.

He never forgot the mother who was too broken up to speak and dropped the phone, leaving Stillwell to listen to the wailing that was always in the background. He remembered the father who numbly gave him the information he wanted, and then asked him if he knew any good funeral homes. And the sister who called him “unspeakable scum” and slammed down the phone.

He almost preferred the ones who swore at him. For underlying his discomfort was the guilt that, but for the luck of his student deferment and a high number in the draft lottery, he could have been the subject of the call instead of the intruder.

Once in awhile, he'd get a grieving relative who was grateful for the opportunity to talk at length about the lost loved one. Stillwell would take down the words of sorrow, but he knew they would never get in the newspaper. The city desk just wanted a few inches on where the dead soldier went to high school and some of his interests.

Stillwell tried a few times to get out of making the calls by saying he couldn't find the family's number, but Jasper Craig always looked up the number in the city directory and handed it to him with a snarl.

Stillwell nearly quit, but eventually a more junior reporter came along to take over the grim duty, and he moved on to cover the Legislature.

* * *

The phone was ringing again, and Stillwell's wife Sarah picked it up in the next room. He took a slug of his bourbon and felt a surge of anxiety as he waited for her to appear at the door. Sarah came into the den with eyes red from a half-hour of weeping.

"That young reporter you just hired at the Trib is on the phone," she said. "They heard what happened to our Jeffrey in Afghanistan and want to know if you can give them any information. How did they find out about it so soon?"

Stillwell sighed. "The Defense Department probably sent out a press advisory right after they notified us."

"You’d think the paper would have somebody higher up call you," Sarah said. “The boy says Jasper Craig told him to call."

"Jasper hasn’t made a tough call himself in 40 years," Stillwell said. “That’s why he’s still assistant city editor.”

"Well, that boy is real nervous about having to make a call like this to the newspaper's editor-in-chief," Sarah said. "Do you want me to tell him you're not available?"

Stillwell stood and embraced his wife. Her wail started softly, but soon filled the house.

"I'll take the call," he said.

Copyright © 2009, David Shapiro. All rights reserved.

Lonesome Graveyard Blues

My Mom and a my Uncle Henry died a year ago, the last of their generation, and we recently lit the one-year memorial candles, ending another year on a solemn note.

Growing older never bothered me before; I passed 30, 40 and 50 totally unfazed. But turning 60 last year as suddenly the oldest surviving member of my family made me feel advancing age rushing at me like the New York Giants defensive line.

I was comforted at 50 by something my former colleague George Steele told me: The best thing about turning 50 is you don't have to worry about dying young anymore.

But poor George couldn't offer any words of wisdom to help me at 60. Sadly, he was one of too many friends who didn't make it that far.

***

My dad died just shy of his 65th birthday. I always felt he'd willed it; his life insurance expired at 65, and he wanted to leave Mom comfortable.

It wasn't much of a life he left. A massive stroke at 61 had taken the left side of his brain and the right side of his body.

Dad had issued explicit instructions that his life not be artificially prolonged, so I was surprised when I arrived in Los Angeles after his stroke to find him in critical care writhing in restraints, with a respirator down his throat, a feeding tube up his nose and a catheter draining his bladder.

His mind was destroyed, with no hope of recovery, and doctors said he was too weak to breathe without life support.

But the family wasn't ready to let him go. By time we consented to removing the tubes, he'd regained enough strength to breathe on his own and lived another four years pushing his wheelchair around the VA hospital with his one good arm, always trying to bum cigarettes.

I figured it didn't matter anymore and brought him a carton whenever I visited.

I'd take him driving on those visits, but he communicated little except to point with animation when we passed funeral homes.

***

Before she died, Mom visited Dad's grave on his birthday, their anniversary and Father's Day. Instead of flowers, she left him a cigarette.

Now they're both buried in Mount Sinai Cemetery in Griffith Park, along with many other departed members of our family. Mom worried that she'd be the last of us to take our rest there and that nobody would visit the graves when she was gone, leaving those she loved as forgotten names in a big cemetery.

She'd be pleased that her children visit Sinai regularly and that my sisters bought plots there. I've long been committed to having my ashes scattered in Hilo Bay, and won't mind if my wife gets them there using the flush method.

***

I don't dwell on death often. I pretty much subscribe to the view expressed by the bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins: "I ain’t afraid of dying, it’s just that you have to stay dead so long."

Hospitals are one place that get me thinking about mortality. I've never been in for anything I feared was fatal, but their corridors are full of the sounds of death.

When I was kept overnight to control an infection before it lit up my multiple sclerosis, an elderly woman down the hall spent all night wailing, "Help me!" She obviously thought her end was near and was scared out of her mind about it.

It was unsettling to hear the doctor and nurses chatting about what to order for dinner minutes after their crash cart couldn't save an ambulance patient brought in having a heart attack.

But it came into perspective when my wife was driving me home from that hospital stay. A hot wind was blowing and I saw a kid walking his bike up the hill to his home, his legs too tired to pedal anymore.

You could feel the gritty mixture of dirt and perspiration that settled in the creases of his neck and forehead and irritated his sunburn.

I waved at the kid with a smile and wished him a good journey. But in that instant I knew that as much as I've enjoyed my journey, there's no way I'd care to start that long trek up the hill all over again.

Copyright © 2009, David Shapiro. All rights reserved.

On writing: Art vs. craft misses the point

(A slightly different version of this appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of flashquake.)

I've always been a nut about studying the mechanics of writing, to the derision of my writing friends of the artiste persuasion. They accuse me of reducing our art form to a hacker's craft as I fall sucker to every new how-to book on writing and creativity.

To me, the argument about whether what we do is art or craft is silly and misses the obvious answer: Writing becomes art when we master the craft so well that it's invisible to readers, who notice the absence of craft in bad writing far more than its presence in good writing.

I enjoy a good muse as much as the next guy. There's no greater high than when she visits and gifts us with brilliant stories that write themselves. But when a deadline looms and the muse is off flirting with the barista at Starbucks, it sure is nice to be able to fall back on competent mechanics to wring out the art.

I come to this obsession with craft from four decades in daily journalism.

Try fitting a muse into your schedule when a full jetliner has crashed into the Potomac and you're working rewrite on deadline with a tall stack of notes in front of you, three TVs tuned to different networks blaring overhead, a phone on each shoulder connected to reporters at the scene, and a bank of frantic editors breathing down your neck.

The 1,800 words of clear, concise drama I produced in less then an hour under those circumstances maybe didn't quite sing like an aria from Rigoletto, but I would definitely call it one of my finest works of art.

I often find myself looking to other art forms to understand craft and how it's applied to summon the muse.

When Eric Clapton performs his soaring blues riffs, he's not thinking about scales. He's practiced those until his fingers bled, and now the guitar becomes an extension of his very being as it gives voice the music he hears in his head.

When PF Bentley sizes up a fleeting photograph, decisions on f-stops, shutter speeds and lighting come automatically as he focuses on capturing the image he sees in his imagination.

When Tiger Woods must have a perfect drive on the 16th hole at Augusta to close in on another Master's title, he's not fretting about his setup and takeaway. He's worked that out on the driving range and now simply visualizes the sweeping draw shot he needs, trusting his ingrained muscle memory to hit it.

In the crush of daily journalism, I ingrained the "muscle memory" of my craft — habits of accuracy, context, plotting, characterization, description, dialogue, foreshadowing, imagery and grammar.

Since shifting from breaking news to the more deliberative pursuits of column writing and the occasional piece of fiction, the challenge is getting started without the forced inspiration of pressing deadlines.

My answer to beating the dreaded writer's block and finding the muse lies in understanding craft — and again, the other arts provide guidance. The issue has never been whether writing is art, but where we individually see the art in our writing.

The "photographer" finds the art in the writing itself, and needs to get composition, focus and texture just right before "snapping the shutter" on one paragraph and moving on to the next. If you’re this kind of writer and you’re blocked, concentrate on perfecting that first paragraph, then perfect another and another until the piece is finished.

The "sculptor" sees the art in the rewriting. The first draft is merely the act of throwing a gob of clay onto the table to be shaped through repeated and loving revision. If you’re this kind of writer and you’re stuck, try typing everything you want to say about the subject as fast as you can without worrying about perfection, trusting that it will all come together in the rewriting.

The "painter" sees the art in the planning. Like Picasso sketching in pencil before applying the paint, this writer likes to outline the main points of a piece before hitting the keyboard. If this is you and you’re blocked, start by sketching an outline from which you can flesh out your story.

Understand the craft and you'll always find the way to set your art free.

Copyright © 2009, David Shapiro. All rights reserved.

Fiction: Demon Dance

(Much of the fiction I write is for contests that provide a little fun and challenge. This was for a 500-word flash fiction contest with a New Year's Eve theme.)

Fireworks flashed through Honolulu's evening sky, climaxing in a thunderous burst at midnight. The Asian ritual of blasting evil spirits out of the New Year had become an excuse for a vulgar display of pyromania.

Colby stared numbly at his little plastic hula dancer Maile, wildly swinging her hips on his coffee table.  The doll was sound-activated to sway and twirl to the tune of "Pearly Shells," and the fireworks had her in a dancing frenzy.

Nani had given him Maile as a wedding gift, to remind him of how they'd met when she danced the sunset show at the Moana Hotel. He was charmed by the statuette's surprisingly warm smile. Back then, Nani's smile never stopped either.

The ringing telephone cut through the din. Colby nervously lifted the receiver.

"She's gone," the female voice said.

"Lei? Is that you?" Colby strained to hear. "There's a lot of noise."

"Nani. She's gone. I thought you should know."

"Damn." Colby looked at his watch. It was 12:15. "Did she make it into the New Year like she wanted?"

"They just pronounced her. You know there's no way my superstitious sister would enter the spirit world until the fireworks scared away the demons."

"Damn. Why wouldn’t she see me, Lei?"

"You cheated on her, Colby. What did you expect?"

"I apologized a thousand times. She was so sick for so long. I was so lonely."

"And Nani wasn't lonely? You're 37, Colby. It's not like your ule was going to shrivel and fall off if you'd waited until she was gone."

"Well, she got her revenge. I'm condemned to a lifetime of feeling like crap."

"It wasn't revenge. She just didn't want betrayal to be the last face she saw in this world. Honor her by living your life as the man she thought she married."

"I needed to see her, Lei, to make things pono."

"You know, they won't move her to the morgue for an hour if you'd like to come say goodbye. I don't think she'd mind now."

A starburst rocket exploded above Colby's lanai. Maile tried to swing back to life, but her battery was spent.

"Damn."

Copyright © 2008, David Shapiro. All rights reserved.