"All Writing is Done on Deadline"
A conversation with Don Murray

By Christopher Scanlan • Reporting, Writing & Editing Group Leader

In 1983, Donald M. Murray published Writing for Your Readers, based on his work as writing coach for The Boston Globe.

In a Writer’s Digest review, Gary Provost called it "one of the best books on writing I have read, and the best book I’ve ever read about reporting."

It wasn’t a surprising response to the thousands of journalists and teachers who have come under the influence of Don Murray, a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and teacher who is considered the pioneer of the writing coach movement. His fans had reason to cheer last fall when Murray published a new edition, revised and updated, titled Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work.

At 77, Murray continues to face deadlines as a weekly columnist for The Boston Globe and as a prolific book author. His latest is My Twice-Lived Life: A Memoir of Aging, published in May by Ballantine.

Murray recently shared his thoughts on deadline writing in an e-mail exchange with Chip Scanlan, Poytner’s Reporting, Writing & Editing Group Leader.

CHIP SCANLAN: What surprised you about revising Writing for Your Readers to make it a new book, Writing to Deadline?

DON MURRAY: The first surprise is that you turn my favorite interview question on me.

I am surprised that my fascination with the writing craft has not faded with age, or with all the publications I have produced on the way writers write. It was 1938 -- 53 years ago! -- when I hooked a ride on the trolley and explored the main Thomas Crane Library in Quincy, Mass., and discovered a book on journalism by the Chicago newspaperman Burton Rascoe. I took it out and found many other books about writers and writing in the low 800 Dewey Decimal numbers. My Baptist deacon father wrote down quotes from the Bible and I started recording quotes from writers in a commonplace book years before I knew the term.

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