Never a day…
It was bound to happen, forgetting something. The intense newness that comes with changing jobs is exhausting, and in a moment of distraction, I left a bag full of things for my new office on the commuter bus. The items inside were sentimental — my college diploma, a few pictures, some favorite pens — but those weren’t what brought me almost to tears as I dialed the bus company’s switchboard. It was the potential loss of a tan, laminated card that says “nulla dies sine linea,” a gift I received more than a decade ago from journalist and writing professor Donald Murray.
As I waited on hold for the operator to check for my bag, I thought about the day I met Murray. I was the same age as the graduate students I’m somehow now seasoned enough to teach, and I’d admired him for years. I took my first newswriting classes in the Donald M. Murray Journalism Lab at the University of New Hampshire and studied under several journalists he’d trained. During my first year as a reporter, I’d read his book Writing to Deadline over and over and over again. So when I knocked on Murray’s door that rainy day in the early aughts, I already understood the tenets of his creative philosophy: Writing is a process, a special — but learnable — way of thinking. You don’t know what you have to say until you bang out a sloppy first draft. Good editors are important, but writers can — and should — identify and rectify most problems with their prose. Rewrite. Rewrite. Then rewrite some more.
I’d gone to visit Murray because I’d started a new beat focused on aging and eldercare, and he was writing a column about the subject for The Boston Globe. What began as a polite conversation about topics and sources morphed into a revelation about the creative life. Murray was in his 80s when I met him. He’d written more than a dozen books, won a Pulitzer in 1954 for editorial writing and trained a generation of journalists and English teachers. And still, he told me, he struggled with his writing. The Latin proverb “nulla dies sine linea” — roughly translated, “never a day without a line” — became a sort of motto for Murray, one he had printed on stacks of laminated cards to give to young writers like me.
Hearing him describe that writing never gets easy was both terrifying and liberating. He explained how he kept notecards in his pocket so he could record ideas and phrases while he was away from his desk. He talked about the discipline to sit down and write, and the serendipity that practice enables. Free write to understand what you have to say. Set priorities so you’ll have something, no matter how small, to show for your efforts at the end of the day. I left his house with a slew of story ideas, a renewed commitment to my own writing process and the laminated card I was now begging the bus company operator to help me find.
Murray died in 2006, so he wrote and taught in a world without iPhones or ubiquitous social media. Sometimes, I’ll stare at one of his books and wonder what he would have thought of the digital landscape where I work everyday to refine my creative voice and help my students to find theirs. He probably would have appreciated the way Twitter demands brevity, and virtual reality might have given him a new way to consider how storytelling gives us, as he titled his memoir, a “twice-lived life.” I hope he’d understand that so many of his teachings still hold.
I don’t carry around notecards, but I do use my phone as a repository for story ideas, observations and the tangles of sentences that appear in my mind in the dead of night. Free writing is a part of every class I teach, and a practice I cultivate most mornings. Those three pages of longhand scribbles are a tether to my creative core and give me the courage to investigate how different tools alter the storytelling experience in ways subtle and profound. That exploration, that sustained curiosity with technological change would have fascinated Murray, too.
The bus company operator came back on the line. The driver had found my bag and, seeing the diploma, brought it to the station for safe keeping. Yes, the operator replied to my question, there was a laminated card in there, too.
