Don Murray took the mystique out of writing

By Samantha Henry

“He was a writer who studied writing, who studied himself, who never let a day go by without writing, and he was an inspiration to so many writers,” said Christopher “Chip” Scanlan about Donald Murray.
Murray’s dedication to Scanlan in his book “Writing to Deadline” referred to Scanlan as a “master journalist, caring teacher, writing colleague, [and] constant friend.”
Scanlan, currently a writer for the Poynter Institute, first met Murray while working as a reporter at the Providence Journal. Murray had come to help the writers better their craft.
“I met Don Murray in the early ‘80s at the Providence Journal,” said Robert Wyss, a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut. “He was a big man. He looked kind of like Santa Claus with his big beard and big belly. He was jolly like Santa Claus too, come to think of it.”
Murray taught Wyss and the other writers at the Providence Journal how information could be broken down and made more accessible – he took the mystique out of writing, Wyss said.
Wayne Worcester, also a journalism professor at UConn, first met Murray in the early 1970s as an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire.
“He was the first of my mentors,” Worcester said. “I learned how to write in Don’s classes. I learned what reporting and writing was all about and why the two were equally important in journalism.”
When Murray died on Dec. 30, 2006 at age 82, he left legions of writers that excel in journalism because of what he taught them.
According to “Introduction: The Essential Donald Murray,” written in part by Thomas Newkirk, one of Murray’s editors, “No one studied the writing process as obsessively as Murray did, and no one wrote it as eloquently and incisively.”
Scanlan, Wyss, and Worcester are now all seasoned journalists with skills that they attribute to the lessons that Murray taught them.
“ He told all of us that one of the most important things a writer could do was to read, read, read and follow his maxim from Horace, 68 A.D., Sine dies nulle linea, which means ‘Never a day without a line,’” Worcester said. “It means write every day. Don was one of the most disciplined writers I’ve ever known. If he had no particular goal in mind, he would sit down and write. The premise was, when you get the fingers moving and the mind in gear, things start to happen. And he was right.”
The writers and editors were skeptical when Murray first came into the Providence Journal. Wyss thought, ‘What in the world could he teach seasoned reporters?’
Scanlan wrote in an article for the Poynter Institute of the moment Murray walked in to the Providence Journal: “Now, chilly receptions often greet academics who venture into newsrooms where cynicism reigns, and murmurs of ‘those who can do, teach’ are never far from journalists’ lips. Don Murray was different. There was no doubt he could ‘do.’”
Murray worked as a writing coach for the Providence Journal as well as The Boston Globe.
“I was more interested in what worked,” Murray wrote in his book, “Writing to Deadline.” “How did reporters and editors collect information, organize it in a clear, coherent, and often graceful style in a matter of hours, meeting impossible deadlines day after day, hour after hour?”
Murray “became an investigative reporter before he knew the term,” he wrote. As a child, he would felt his world was full of contradictions with criticisms jumping from family member to family member.
“I was a listener, a watcher, a spy, a sneak. I was driven by continuous, hungry curiosity – and I still am,” Murray wrote.
Murray dropped out of high school in tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades to work on the Boston-Record American, where he lied about his age to get the job.
“I don’t know if they believed my age, but they knew I would work long hours for about four bucks a day,” Murray wrote in his book, “Writing to Deadline.”
Murray later finished school at Tilton School and Tilton Junior College before graduating from the University of New Hampshire. At the time of his death, Murray lived in Durham, N.H., where he was able to walk to UNH and teach English. Murray also established the journalism program at UNH while working as a writing coach.
In his early years after college, Murray was ashamed to be a journalist. As an English major in college, he was taught that journalism was not literature.
“I was a professional writer but I was not literary,” Murray wrote in his book “Writing to Deadline.” “But basically I was a journalist, not – I thought – a real writer. Even a Pulitzer – for journalism – could not change my feeling that I practiced a craft that could never become art.”
In 1954 he was the youngest person ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for a series about national defense written for the Boston Herald.
“Don Murray probably did more in his lifetime to de-mystify the process of writing than any other person in the country,” said Worcester. “He had little tolerance for the poseur who insists on waiting for the muse to visit before writing can begin. Little wonder that Murray’s books on writing are useful to the novice and the professional both.”
Murray later learned to take pride in his craft.
“He was an extraordinary teacher, a gifted poet, novelist, columnist, reporter and teacher and a life-long student of the craft of writing,” Worcester said.
What is unique about the way Murray writes?
“His vulnerability,” Scanlan said. “His willingness to show, in his writing, strength by admitting his weaknesses, to show courage by doing what he feared, and by reminding all of us that we should never apologize for being human.”
When Murray died he left behind two daughters, Anne and Hannah, sons-in-law Karl and Michael, and three grandchildren, Michaela, Joshua, and Samuel. His wife of 54 years, Minnie Mae, died in February 2005 from Parkinson’s disease.
“[Murray] was a gadget freak,” said Scanlan. “He loved computers, always buying the newest ones. On his desk when he died was a beautiful iMac with a massive screen – not sure if it was 20” or 24”. He was always buying new scanners and hoped for optical character recognition software that really worked. I admired the way he started his career writing on manual typewriters and finished, at 82, with a digital one. We used to joke that we could get gadgets – I’m an early adopter too – by telling our wives, ‘They’re tools, not toys.’ It didn’t always work!”
Narrative was always part of Murray’s life. He wrote in his book “Writing to Deadline” that as a child he would put himself to sleep telling stories.
Newkirk wrote that Murray’s stories brought his own stories to the forefront. Murray’s passion with writing inspired people to write – to put words on paper – or screen, Newkirk wrote.
“Stories explained the world, found cause and effect in confusion, sequence in contradiction, order in disorder,” Murray wrote. “I was fascinated by stories, terrified by stories, comforted by stories, instructed by stories.”