Donald Murray (writer) - On Writing

On Writing

Murray chronicled his relationship with writing until the day he died. In a column published just before his death, he wrote, "Each time I sit down to write I don't know if I can do it. The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can". His final column was published in the Boston Globe five days before his death.

Throughout his book, Crafting a Life, Murray demonstrates his writing process and provides guidelines for readers developing their own writing. He notes authors who have provided inspiration for his personal writing like Graham Greene and George Orwell. Orwell's essay Why I Write is especially apparent in Murray's motivation to write. When considering how to begin his own writing, Murray said, "I remembered them as being unexpected but true to what happens in the essay". In Crafting a Life, he lists and explains his manifesto: I write to say I am, discover who I am, create life, understand my life, slay my dragons, exercise my craft, lose myself in my work, for revenge, to share, to testify, to avoid boredom, and to celebrate. Murray compared a writer's voice in language to music and deemed its significance as the key factor in capturing an audience. In addressing the complexities of voice in writing, Murray noted the following elements as important to developing a writer's voice: revealing specifics, the word, the phrase, the beat, and the point of view. He encourages writers to write with their readers as new stories are composed. To demonstrate this, he provides examples of his own writing and along side that, writes what the reader might think or say in response. He then discusses, briefly, researching certain topics to strengthen the ethos of the writer.

Murray encouraged the writer to embrace and not fear self-exposure. "In effective writing and, especially in personal-essay writing, the author exposes himself or herself, revealing thoughts and feelings that the reader had also experienced but may have denied...and that is the strength of many essays. It is, however, a problem for the writer who is usually uncomfortable about this exposure".

When writing fiction, Murray provides a traditional scene for writers to follow:

• Two or more characters: The back story—their relationship before the scene
• Conflict or tension between them
• A place
• Dialogue—what is or is not said
• Physical action—what they do or do not do
• The narrator who tells the story from an omniscient, godlike point of view; or from the first-person point of view