Giving Away the Store, Part 6: Do Something New

My college journalism professor assigned the class to interview someone we did not know and report about it. During this time, the early seventies, New York City's streets were teeming with homeless people much like today. I decided to interview a homeless person. 

In those days, I was living in the James Monroe Housing Projects in the Bronx. That neighborhood, a euphemism if there ever was one for the projects, was a drug haven, so I had seen plenty of gang members, dealers, junkies, pimps, and prostitutes. But homeless people were scarce in the projects. Riding the graffiti-covered, unwashed, fetid subway cars from the Bronx, where I lived with my immigrant parents and siblings, to Manhattan, where I studied and worked, was an adventure, frequently a scary and dangerous one, replete with vagrants, panhandlers, gangbangers, and muggers. During nighttime rides home, I would act crazy, pacing back and forth on the train platform and talking to myself loudly enough to be heard in the hopes of keeping everyone at a distance. Those were strange times for an 18-year-old man. The specter of being drafted into the Army to serve in a battlefield 9,000 miles away to kill strangers or die myself lay heavily on my mind, but sometimes I wanted to get away so badly that I thought about enlisting in America's war machine.

I don't recall why I chose to interview a homeless person. I'm sure I wouldn't have without the prompt from my journalism professor. I did pay close attention to homeless people whenever I emerged from the number 6 train at Twenty-third Street and Park Avenue South. Whether they were sleeping on the sidewalk against a storefront, pulling down their zipper or lifting their dress to pee in plain sight, screaming at invisible demons, or dragging their possessions in a shopping cart with a missing wheel in the midst of rush hour traffic, I was always shaken by their circumstances and feeling privileged to be in my own humble, relatively fortunate, situation.

With an hour to kill after classes before heading to work, I walked to Madison Square Park, two blocks away from Baruch College, where I was a student. The park is far more attractive today than it was in 1972. The benches were occupied by the nameless, the crazed, the hopeless, the wasted, the forgotten. Most businesspeople would walk a long detour around the park, which stretches from Twenty-third to Twenty-sixth Streets between Madson and Fifth Avenues, rather than make a beeline to their offices by walking through the park. Not I. I was young enough, curious enough, foolish enough, romantic enough to walk out of my way to enter the park whenever I could. I wanted to observe, to bear witness, to the most miserable humans on Manhattan Island amid some of the wealthiest real estate on Earth. The contrast got to me. I wanted to write about it.

I'll leave this post here for now. It's not important how many times I was unsuccessful in getting a coherent, cooperative interviewee before I met a forty-year-old Korean War veteran named Sal. It doesn't matter to the point of this story where Sal was from, what he did before his residence became Madison Square Park, or how he descended into such a desperate situation. I have long forgotten the angle of my writing assignment or the grade I received. But I do know that the assignment I chose changed me. Everything we do changes us. That's what writers do. Experience. Report. Change. Repeat.

Giving Away the Store, Part 5: Ask Questions

Writers ask questions. They are among the first people who will ask questions about someone or something that piques their curiosity. Why did your parents give you your name? At what age did you l arrive in America? Why have Black men held the 100-meter dash world record over the past 65 years? What are the first and last places on earth to see the sun rise? Are typewriters obsolete worldwide? How did a grand piano get into a tiny basement jazz club? What do the colors of the Timor-Leste flag signify? How often to do you visit your family in Bangladesh? Can people who speak Mandarin and Wu understand each other? Why are five years necessary to graduate from architecture school? Why do most people consider this person more attractive than that person? 

Of course, questions can get too personal. We should not be surprised if someone we question out of pure curiosity answers, "It's none of your business." Worse, we might become victims of the inept ethics police. But the problem is everything is a writer's business. Asking questions may not necessarily get us the answers we seek, but the imaginative journey is all about asking questions. Carson McCullers might have asked, what if people saw a man's deafness as a mighty advantage, which led her to writing The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Ernest Hemingway might have asked, can an old, poor, defeated man endure even more than most of us while remaining true to his principles, before writing The Old Man and the Sea. Alice Munro might have asked how can a woman reconcile her love of someone she believes to be a murderer, sparking her to write "The Love of a Good Woman."

Almost any good story probably comes from a writer asking questions, and the stories they write engage their readers, not necessarily by answering those questions but by making their readers ask questions as well. 

Giving Away the Store, Part 4: Living in Libraries and Bookstores

Writers read. Reading fuels writers. It feeds their perception, jumpstarts their animation, sparks their inspiration, ignites their innovation. While electronic media increasingly make research and reading accessible and immediate, writers still call libraries and bookstores their home. I passed one today, the Book Trader Cafe in New Haven, and found there a long-sought used book in excellent condition at a deeply discounted price. 

The title of the found book is irrelevant for the purpose of this post. What matters is that writers are continually on the lookout for information: data to interpret, stories to adapt, ideas to cultivate. They capture this content from what they read. (They also find source material in the art they see, the music they listen to, and the people they meet; these wellsprings will serve as topics of future posts in this series.) 

Wherever I go, I visit the libraries and bookstores, many of which I have mentioned in WORDS ON THE LINE over the past twenty years. I am a card-carrying member of two city and three college libraries. I feel rich. If you are an aspiring writer, I suggest you go home, to a library or bookstore.

Giving Away the Store, Part 3: Perverse Punctuation

Great writers don't follow rules. They don't look up in a style book how to use a comma. They invent their own rules. Some don't even care about the standard subject-verb-object order of English if they can create a dramatic effect, as in by the grace of God go I. Here's an example of an exceptional writer, whose name has often appeared in this blog, who defies conventional punctuation rules:

One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or another, become wicked: because they are so wretched. And one's turning away, then, for what I have called the welcome table is dictated by some mysterious vow one scarcely knows one's taken—never allow oneself to fall so low. – from James Baldwin,  No Name in the Street in Collected Essays (Library of America, p. 374)

Most writing teachers would suggest that a dash should replace the colon, and a colon should replace the dash. To which Baldwin would surely say, "I don't care what you suggest." Baldwin was a born rebel, a fierce social critic, an American treasure, a global original, and an extraordinary writer, among the many other reasons why his life and work have resurged nearly four decades after his work. He has been the subject of notable documentaries, biopics, biographies, and plays. (For my money, he has never receded into the shadows of world literature.)  

Back to my point. Writing by the textbook requires us to use colons for announcements and dashes for emphasis. Baldwin seems to apply those rules in reverse. But why fuss over rules when you want people to focus on your ideas, not your understanding of grammatical edicts? Be on the lookout for rule breakers in your reading of masterful writers.

Giving Away the Store, Part 2: Word Smarts

If I find a website that contains more than a half dozen answers to questions students have frequently asked me, I'd have no choice but to refer it. Word Smarts is such a site. 

Word Smarts offers an extensive list of grammar, diction, punctuation, and style tips. You will learn something about our spoken and written language, as well as find the reading entertaining, whether you are looking for the standard uses of an ellipsis, difference between fewest and least, purposes of the past participle, or origin of "how come." 

You can also subscribe to the site to receive periodic email updates.

Giving Away the Store, Part 1: The Value of Reading Aloud

A fellow writing consultant once told me, "Don't tell your clients everything you know because then they won't need you." I never accepted such wrongheaded advice. I decided she was insecure, limited, selfish, and ignorant. Any consulting business built on such a model cannot succeed. 

Since I have been in this business, I have tried to use my education and knowledge to bring people in, not to keep them out; to lift them up, not to put them down; to move them forward, not to hold them back. How could I embody my mantra without giving my all to whomever I could whenever I could and wherever I was? I believe that the more you give, the more you get. The past three decades have proven me right. I am still here doing my thing.

In this spirit of giving, I will give away the store. I will dedicate all of 2025 to promoting sources other than my own to help people cultivate their writing craft. I start with this simple yet powerful suggestion from "Reading Aloud" by Melissa Kirsch writing for the New York Times. As far as I remember, I understood the benefits of reading to children. But this article also underscores the delights and rewards of being read to. By listening to a reader, we practice concentration, listen to the rhythm of a language, and build a bond with our reader. With a skilled reader, we also learn the meaning and pronunciation, or additional meanings and pronunciations of words. We also get insights into punctuation, hearing the slight pauses of commas,  longer pauses of periods, dramatic emphasis of dashes and colons, and minor interruptions of parentheses. This article is less than a five-minute read with a terrific reference to Harvard Sentences. It's definitely a worthwhile read.

Twentieth Anniversary of WORDS ON THE LINE

I figured I would keep this blog alive for a year. Or two. Then five. Maybe ten. After 1,162 posts and 20 years of WORDS ON THE LINE, I'm still here. I have written most of these posts in half of the United States (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, DC, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Illinois, Colorado, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, California, and Hawaii), but I also wrote some of them in a dozen other countries too (Canada, Cuba, Iceland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece, India, China, and Australia). 

WORDS ON THE LINE has focused on writing at work, school, and home. In a sense, you can see this blog as a professional autobiography, as I have written about many of my activities, ideas, interests, and goals. The topics listed on the sidebar offers numerous tips on a wide range of writing-related topics, including book reviews, diction, grammar, and style. Searching a topic in the Search This Blog bar will reveal the depth of information I've collected over these past two decades. You can also write me at Phil@PhilVassallo.com if you have questions about writing.