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writer's idea part 2
02/08/2006 = 05:00 PM

Well, I made it through the first part of the writing exercise I set for myself. I'm banged up and battered, but it's bled itself out.

On to part 2:

Write about a creative person you admire but don't know personally, such as a famous painter or musician or writer, living or dead. As in the previous prompt, explain why you feel this person is or was so creative. If necessary, do a little research to find out more about this person's creative gifts and habits. When you finish this piece, compare the people you wrote about in these two prompts. What qualities do they share? What qualities do you most admire in them?

— The Writer's Idea Book, © 2000 Jack Heffron

Mr. O, the best English teacher I ever had, turned me onto Dave Barry's column when I was a high school senior. Almost every Monday, the O would get all up in our faces with the Sunday New Haven Register and read the whole thousand words to us. "You see what I mean?" he'd say, and we would, indeed, see.

Mr. O didn't expect us to be as good as Dave Barry, and he didn't expect us to write in the same style as Dave Barry, but he did expect us to hold ourselves and our work to the same standards that Dave Barry aspired to, week after week, and I have tried to do so.

I don't always succeed, but then, Dave Barry doesn't always make me laugh, either.

And he's got a Pulitzer Prize and things.

Dave Barry still works for the Miami Herald. He's not, I guess, a columnist for them anymore, since he took a sabbatical last year and doesn't seem to have any foreseeable plans for returning to that forum. But his blog is hosted by them, and they are understandably proud to have him associated with them, even if all he currently does is to watch and report on the television show 24, or to let us, his alert readers, send him odd news links, on which he comments in single-sentence blurbs.

Which are still funnier than any thousand words than I have ever generated at any given time.

When I was first exposed to Barry's work, he was still churning out a column every single damned week for the Herald's Tropic Magazine, syndicated nationwide (including, thank heavens, in the Register), and his creativity was boundless. He could crank out a full column and sidebar about toenail maintenance or weasel poop that would leave me in pain from having snorted an entire glass of orange juice out of my nose.

Part of it was his delivery, of course. Dave Barry was, and is, tremendously fond of the English language, and makes full use of its vocabulary and tricks of phrase to create visuals with which one can easily identify: "He approached it with all the enthusiasm of a person being strapped down for brain surgery via ice pick." In a single, fluid sentence, we are as connected to his brain as if he were telepathically plugging into our synapses. One doesn't have to find the previous thought humorous in order to be able to visualize the subject's reaction to whatever the situation was (I don't remember it off the top of my head, but I believe it was a massage).

Dave's work was not limited to newspaper columns, though that was where most of his bread got buttered, as it were. He had, at the time I started reading him, several collections of his columns published in book form, but he had also written quite a few complete books on humorous subjects and "information" that were just as amusing and interesting as were his weekly observations.

Writer's block was not an acceptable excuse for Dave not to write. If inspiration didn't strike him immediately, he'd bloody well find some, whether it meant venturing out into the big, bad world and playing the role of a corpse in an opera, venturing into a cafeteria to see what flavor of frozen yogurt was currently being featured, or venturing into his home office, stupid dogs under his desk (emitting stupid dog fumes from their respective stupid dog butts), and eating Cheese Nips.

Dave Barry's home life was as much fodder for his column as was any other topic. We knew about his wife, Beth, and his son, Rob (whose birthday is October 8th, and I will never forget that date, because in the book Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, Dave used that date for everything, so you'd only have one date to remember), and the dogs: his main stupid dog, Earnest, and Zippy, who was the auxiliary backup stupid dog. Later, there would be his new wife, Michelle, and their daughter Sophie, though not as much; I believe he had chosen to be a bit more private by that point.

Whatever else one could say about Dave Barry, fact and fiction were very well-delineated. Gray areas did not exist in Dave's work — when he was satirizing or embellishing, he came right out (whether via footnotes or parenthetical remarks) and announced it proudly, with the comedic timing for which his writing was lauded regularly. By the same token, when reporting on the ridiculous but true, Dave would immediately declare, "I am not making this up," and we could rely on him.

I refer to Mr. O as the best English teacher I ever had, and here's why: he hammered home that I must always tighten my work, to get the unnecessary words out of there, to substitute synonyms for the words "nice" or "thing" (too wishy-washy) whenever possible, and to ensure that my writing reflected my voice. But he also introduced me to Dave Barry's work, and this was just as important a lesson — that one can write truth even when one is "making it up."

Dave Barry was able to present reality in a creative manner and to present creativity in a real manner. Unlike the writer to whom I referred in the previous exercise, Dave Barry's writing, whether fact or satire, has always been truthful, whereas her writing, even when it was about something real, was always pretty much lies. That is why I can and do admire Dave Barry, even if he no longer writes a thousand words every week, and cannot and do not admire the other writer.

drinking: peach fruit₂o
listening to: Broooce, Rosalita
head: aching, actually