Making Your Columns More Lyrical

By: Dave Astor When you think of this Louisiana city, you think of food and music. So the National Society of Newspaper Columnists (NSNC) provided its conference attendees with plenty of good meals and sessions that mixed songs with discussion.

One speaker, the Poynter Institute's Roy Peter Clark, talked about the connections between music and writing while skillfully playing several tunes on the piano.

"You can listen to music in preparation for writing, while writing, and after writing as a kind of reward," said Clark. He also noted that music and writing both elicit memories and other feelings, and both "open doors to cultures different than our own." The two crafts even share terminology, such as "setting a tone" in a column and making words "sound" right.

Clark said more columnists should read their work out loud to make sure they "capture the music" in their prose. "We usually appeal to readers through the eyes," he observed. "We need to appeal to readers through the ears."

Columns need variations -- such as different sentence lengths -- just like music does, Clark added. And writers trying to end their pieces can take a lesson from songs. Columns might build to a crescendo (Clark cited Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness"), end abruptly (he played "Louie, Louie"), seemingly end but start up again ("Do You Love Me?"), or fade out (the Isley Brothers' version of "Twist and Shout").

"Everyone needs 'Pips,'" continued Clark, referring to the backup singers for Gladys Knight. One way a columnist can use "Pips" is by quoting other people saying things in a way that sounds different than the writer's voice.

Clark began his talk by playing "America the Beautiful" in the style of Ray Charles to mark the death of Charles and Ronald Reagan. Another pianist, Thibodaux, La., Daily Comet columnist Gibbens Robichaux, opened the NSNC conference earlier that morning by playing "God Bless America" in tribute to Reagan. And noted New Orleans pianist and composer Henry Butler played and spoke during a session in which he also touched on similarities in music and writing. "Make sure 'the hook' is there," Butler advised columnist attendees. "But the more obvious you make the hook, the less profound it's going to be."

Another speaker, Portland Oregonian columnist and published poet S. Renee Mitchell, discussed how poetry helps her newspaper writing.

"Poetry really sharpens my awareness," she said. "Poetry, like music, makes you think about the rhythm of words and how to make them more meaningful and more moving. Poetry gets me in touch with emotions. As writers, we're taught to be very observant. Poetry helps me do that better."

She asked audience members why they don't read more poetry, and some of the responses were that the art form can be "inaccessible," "abstract," and "narcissistic." But it doesn't have to be, as Mitchell demonstrated when she read a poem about a shooting she wrote on deadline for her Oregonian column.

Mitchell usually keeps actual poetry out of her newspaper writing. "We don't necessarily have to write columns as poems, but when we use the skill of poets, columns become more poetic," she said. Mitchell cited, by way of example, the case of a woman who grows award-winning tulips. One could write a straightforward column about that, or do a column about how the favorite flowers of the woman's late husband were tulips and that she keeps growing them in his memory. "It gives you a different perspective and a window into her pain," said Mitchell.