The other day I wrote a first-person account about an interaction I had with a Sandy Hook dad who touched me when I met him by happenstance six months after his daughter was murdered. I ended up writing a story that day but I held a little something back just for me: Jeremy's advice for how to get through even the most horrible days. I wish he had remembered his own advice this week when he took his own life.
What he told me was to look for something beautiful every day. There's always something, he told me. I wish he had looked harder before he made that awful decision to leave this world. Rebecca Droke, the Post-Gazette's visuals editor and a good friend of mine, knew about my encounter with Jeremy Richman and encouraged me to write something about it. My first instinct was no. (I need to get past that and start saying YES to things generally!) But she got me thinking so I did. The story must have been bubbling up inside me because flowed through my fingers quickly. I read it when I was done but didn't think it would be of wide interest. I tested it out as a Facebook post and the reaction was so encouraging that I handed it over to my editors. It wound up on A1 and quickly became wildly popular online, where it was Tweeted and reposted over and over. Was it the first-person point of view that made this post so popular? I have to think it was. I've written many stories before that quoted sources relaying poignant moments like my own encounter with Jeremy but none of them got the same kind of reaction. When I write "I" I am talking about me, but when a reader is absorbed in a story than "I" becomes them, too. I think the difference is the pronoun. I. Such a little word. Maybe I really am on to something with my idea to experiment with a new first-person model of literary journalism. I could be onto something. I feel encouraged. And that is a beautiful thing.
3 Comments
Joseph Ick
3/30/2019 06:46:54 am
Absolutely on to something. I love your writing.
Reply
Tracie
3/30/2019 07:08:08 am
Thanks so much!
Reply
Maryann Massengill Black
3/31/2019 03:32:11 am
Your writing of this story was emotional and heartfelt. It makes the reader know that journalists are not always about the "story."
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Tracie MaurielloConverting caffeine into sentences since 1994. Archives
November 2019
Categories |