Speaker: Rick Bragg
Session: Writing in Color
Dec. 1, 2001, 11:15-12:30 p.m.

RICK BRAGG WRITES -- AND SPEAKS -- IN COLOR

By Amber Eden

I really miss writing.

That’s the main reason I volunteered to write one of these session profiles. After 10 years and a master’s degree in journalism, I left the profession for a cushy copywriting job. I’ve been pretty okay with that decision until probably about yesterday, when I walked into hotel full of people passionate about what I guess I’m still passionate about.

And if anyone can make you miss writing especially so, it’s Rick Bragg speaking in his slow Southern drawl about how to put color into writing. He reminded me of those things that made me fall in love with the job of finding the story -- where it begins, where it leads you, how it ends. The art of storytelling.

"Just paint a picture and fill it up with color," he said. "A mute statistic won’t make anyone cry, but paint them a picture and you can. … A million mute statistics won’t do it, you have to write it like hell."

It made me remember that terror I would feel when starting a story, the fear that even though I’d done this a thousand times before that somehow this time it wouldn’t work out. And then there’s the pleasure I’d get when the lead presented itself, usually after what looked like a bunch of meaningless running around and talking and note-taking. ("There’s no real trick to getting those morsels. All you have to do is keep your eyes open," Bragg said.)

And he reminded me what is so key to the task of sitting down and writing: "The basic reason that we try to write pretty is just so that we don’t cheat anybody … You need to know that you haven’t trivialized it."

I’ve been going through a period when I’ve wondered about the importance of writing when so many people do it and so many people do it well. This famous New York Times reporter with a good old boy attitude reminded me that it’s still, at heart, an intimate pursuit, one person talking to another and recording the information. Bragg was more concerned with how a story about Timothy McVeigh would speak to the Oklahoma City locals, than to the world at large: "Considering the time in which we write, we have a great responsibility not to write cliché, not to write blandly," he said.

Just those words speak volumes about the importance of writing.

Bragg wrapped up his speech with a great story about Sister Helen of "Dead Man Walking" fame. He openly admitted that it had absolutely nothing to do with a speech about narrative journalism. But it was a good story, and if you go to another talk by him you’ll be pretty guaranteed to hear it. His point: to "tell a good story, just for the heck of telling a good story, with good imagery, color and detail."

Following his lead, I have a good story to tell, too, that has nothing to do with Rick Bragg or narrative journalism. I came to this conference at the urging of my best friend, who went to the same college with me in Santa Fe, N.M., and later to the same graduate school in Columbia, Mo. We were standing in the lobby when someone called my friend’s name, and it was a third woman, whom we haven’t seen in years, who also went to college with us. Our histories are too intricately and perhaps fatefully tied up to go into, but it was amazing, yet also appropriate, that we should all be together again.

Twenty years ago, the three of us started out at a small and crazy liberal arts school in New Mexico. Now one lives in New York City, one lives in Houston, one lives in rural Connecticut. We started out learning Ancient Greek together and now we’re all here in Boston, we’re all journalists in some respect or another, and we all still love writing. And for some strange reason, we’re all still working on writing.

It may not be a story to anyone else, but to me, that’s a story.

About Rick Bragg, I should give him a little more space, because this piece is supposed to be about him and he was incredibly funny, as well as being really inspiring. This is his most useful advice:

"If you stay in enough hotels, you’ll never have to buy soap or shampoo again."

Amber Eden
Copywriter, Avon

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