Write Stuff

Mississippi is about the last place most New Yorkers would turn to for inspiration. Shadowed by its sordid civil rights history, dismal support of public education and rural poverty, Mississippi often brings up the bottom in any list of states ranked for quality of life. The latest report in the news here is that Mississippi does lead in one thing – obesity.

Yet, in a trip crisscrossing the state from Natchez to Yazoo City to Oxford to Jackson, your itinerant Write Stuff correspondent found inspiration in the words and places of native Mississippians like Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Willie Morris and William Faulkner. Perhaps because of their region’s past — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’’ Faulkner once famously wrote – the state’s legendary storytellers have much to teach those of us interested in writing and how to improve it.

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Shout Outs

Folks, it’s time to talk about quotes. “Getting quote” is one of the most time-honored practices in our profession. Nothing wrong with that, as long as the quotes drive the story, or show character and originality. But that’s not what I’m seeing. Too many boring, bureaucratic, take-me-no-place quotes – “room-emptiers” – pop up in your writing, no matter whether it’s news, features or live-ins. So many that I was about to suggest an exercise in which no one would be allowed to quote directly, only to paraphrase in crisp, compelling language.

Fortunately, I found examples of why we’re always looking for a great quote. Marlene Peralta knew that the words of steam-blast victim Gregory McCullough said it all:

“We would have been boiled like lobsters,” McCullough said. “If we would have stayed in the truck, we wouldn’t have survived.”

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Shout Outs

When sentences run the same length throughout a story, it gets monotonous. Readers drop off. The solution: Vary sentence length. Read and listen to Kenyon Farrow’s lead on an international AIDS conference this summer to see how he varies sentence length and punctuation to great effect (the emphasis is mine):

HIV experts gathering at the International AIDS Society conference in Sydney next week are sure to champion the need for greater treatment access in the developing world—and to point out that in the United States, by contrast, drugs have made HIV a manageable disease. But that is only partly true: Many HIV-positive people in this country confront financial barriers and a labyrinth of rules that keep life-saving medications beyond their reach. For them, HIV is not manageable at all.

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