Smart, simple advice from a man I respect.
Good morning, fellow scribblers.
Do you have big ears? I hope so.
No, I don’t mean ears like our redbone hound Gypsy has.
I mean big as in “attentive” ears.My longtime friend and fellow editor Bruce Locklin encouraged his reporters to bring what he called the “Big Ears, Big Eyes” approach to reporting.
Any writer can and should use a similar approach.
It doesn’t matter if it’s only a letter to Mom,’
You can even do it in a resignation letter to the Boss From Hell.By Big Ears & Eyes, Bruce meant to paint pictures for your readers.
Put them in the scene. Let them hear people talking. Let them see what’s going on.
Novelists, fiction writers and top flight newspaper and magazine writers do it.
TV does it with a camera. We can do it with words on paper, online and now video.During the Vietnam War, one of our best reporters, Roger Bierne, had the sad assignment of interviewing the mother of a young soldier who had been killed.
Roger knew the young man’s mother might welcome a chance to talk about her son.
If not, he would apologize and ask her for just enough detail to give our readers an idea of his loss to her and our community.
As luck would have it, the mother was a strong woman who loved her son and welcome an opportunity to talk about his virtues – and his foibles.Roger came back to the office with pages of notes.
She had shared anecdotes about her son growing up, falling out of trees, getting sent to the principal’s office, trying out for football, nervously asking a girl to the prom.
These are all the ingredients of a young man’s life growing up in America — and a compelling story for our readers.Roger was not a fast writer. He was a poet at heart and agonized over each word.
As they talked in the mother’s living room, her younger son was just outside in the drive bouncing a basketball. He kept bouncing and bouncing it.
“He’s frustrated,” his mother said. “He admired his brother. This is hard for him.”Roger’s painfully but beautifully crafted story used the “thump, thump, thump” of the basketball as a rhythmic break throughout his story.
He put his readers in her living room, listening to her spin her stories about her son and hearing the thump of the basketball in the drive.In early September 1040, 14 months before Pearl Harnor, reporter Ernie Pyne was in London. Here is what he wrote for his readers back home on the Nazi bombings:
“They came just after dark, and somehow you could sense from the quick, bitter firing of the guns that there was to be no monkey business this night.
“Shortly after the sirens wailed you could hear the Germans grinding overhead. In my room, with its black curtains drawn across the windows, you could feel the shake from the guns. You could hear the boom, crump, crump, crump, of heavy bombs at their work of tearing buildings apart.”As you tune up your Big Ears and Eyes, you will have opportunities such as Roger and Ernie had.You might not have noticed those opportunities before.
In your reading, watch for examples of Big Ears and Eyes reporting and writing by others. Some great ones to read are the collected World War II reporting of Ernie Pyle, the “On the Road” reporting of Charles Kuralt and the travel writing of Mark Twain (“Roughing It” and “The Innocents Abroad”), John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charlie” and William (Last Heat Moon) Trogden’s “Blue Highways.”
Note: These tips will be published in a book next spring. If you care to send 25 to 50 words about the value you find in them, they will be included in the book and you will receive your own personal copy.
If you subscribe, it will clutter your inboxes weekly and cost you the time to read it.
Other than that it costs nothing but perhaps a few brain cells. And they grow back.
My Promise: Join me on October 25th and I’ll tell you more than big ears, and a little about money.
