The Magic of Writing

By Bob Hope

Writing has always fascinated me. When I was in high school, I’d enter the citywide poetry contest every year.  I wanted my poem to stand out, not blend in with the others.  I figured the best way to do that was to surprise readers, to take an approach they wouldn’t expect.  My senior year I won.  The movie Camelot had come out, and the hero was Sir Lancelot, the big, strong, and brave Knight of the Roundtable.  I wrote about my hero, Sir Lancealittle, “a tiny little knight, a little bitty fellow who hated to fight.”  It wasn’t something Robert Frost or Rudyard Kipling would have written, but in the Atlanta public school system, it won the prize.

In college, I decided to take a journalism class on writing.  When we were sent to cover the Georgia legislature, the others in the class were drawn to the highest profile politicians and the most important legislation.  I, however, tried to find the least known legislators with the most obscure laws they wanted passed, like whether or not every pig should have a name.  It wasn’t heavy or fun, but it interested me and seemed to stand out when read in class.

My fascination with writing continued while I was still in school and started working in the public relations department for the Atlanta Braves.  I was always in search of a good and interesting story.  I loved how I could write a story and it could magically show up in the newspapers and other media all over the country….but only if it was unusual enough.  We had a pitcher named Pat Jarvis whose nickname was the Little Bulldog.  He was scrappy and feisty and played well above his ability.  I soon discovered that the best way to find interesting stories about our players was to call their mothers.  Players didn’t seem to want to talk but moms were quick to tell stories about their sons.  Pat Jarvis was from the small town of Carlyle, Illinois.  Back then, there was no internet and few baseball games were televised.  The only way to experience a game in progress was either by being there in person or listening on the radio.  Today the population of Carlyle is 3,000.  Back then it was likely half that number.  By calling Pat’s mom, I found out that the entire town gathered at the local water tower when he pitched; they would use the water tower as an antenna and listen to the Braves game broadcast on the Atlanta radio station.  It was a cool story, I wrote about it, and quickly Pat Jarvis was known all over the country.  It seemed almost like magic. 

I’ve written a couple of books, lots of press release and articles, and use Facebook as a writing outlet, even though my daughters tell me that’s not what it is intended to be.  But I love to write.

Recently I was asked to teach a writing class at the University of South Carolina, in fact, two days of classes.  I was inspired.  First, I needed to research some information so I could fill a couple of hours of time.  I think I did well.

I taught them about the five P’s of good writing – person, problem, place, plot, and prose.  Personally, I like number one and five best.  Person, on the list, is intended to be the subject of the story being written.  However, in my view, the most important person is the writer.  People have varying degrees of writing skill and also each writer is different from the next.  And different writers have different observation abilities, to see what is happening.  The same story written by one writer can be informative but also fairly boring.  The next writer can make it shine, exciting, and memorable.  Some writers just state facts while others can paint a picture in the mind of the reader.  Granted, there must be a person in the story to write about, but the person who makes the biggest difference is the writer.  It is impossible to write a story if nothing is happening, only Seinfeld on TV seemed to make that work.  There needs to be a problem to solve, and the story hopefully takes place in a place, ideally an interesting and appropriate place.  Writing needs a plot, but a plot is just a sequence of events that make up a story.  In fact, in writing a book, a book is just a sequence of stories that, in the end, combine to make a book or not.

Finally, the prose.  I am intrigued by prose.

There are 20,000 words in a typical movie.  And, yet, only a few can stand out and be remembered for a long, long time.  “There’s no crying in baseball,” so Tom Hanks tells one of his players in a League of Their Own.  Or Tom Hanks again in Forrest Gump says, “Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.”   Clint Eastwood simply said, “Go ahead. Make my day,” in just five words of the 20,000 words in the movie Sudden Impact.  “You’re killing me, Smalls,” “Play it again, Sam,” in Casablanca, which actually was never said in the movie but became legend anyway.  Or the famous line at the end of Casablanca that actually was said, “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”  Or “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” in Gone with the Wind.  It seems reasonable that a great writer would want every line to leap into immortality, but most don’t, regardless of how hard the screen writer tries.

The same holds true for books.  There are four million books published a year, each averages 300 pages with 75,000 words.  Lines like “those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind,” or “dance like nobody is watching” or “people will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”  Or, perhaps, the random quote from Scout, “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”   And there are classic lead lines like Charles Dicken’s “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”

Words used well in the right context have power.  There are 180,000 words in the New Testament of the Bible.  Theologians credit only one two-word phrase as summing up Christianity.  Those are “Jesus wept,” the only place where God shows empathy for humanity.

When I taught in South Carolina, I went down a list of a hundred commonly used phrases and asked the students if they heard them often.  Everyone nodded yes.  They were lines like:   Every dog has its day.  What’s done is done.  Willy nilly.  Upset the apple cart. Break a leg.  Bury the hatchet.  Count your blessings.  Cutting corners.  Drives me up a wall.  Wild goose chase.  Dime a dozen.  Apple of my eye.  I told them that one person came up with each of the 100 quotes.  Nobody guessed it was William Shakespeare.

There is a magical quality of writing that can impact people immediately and years later when the writer has passed on.   

The poem “If” was written by Rudyard Kipling in 1909.  He was British, and the poem was voted as the greatest poem ever written by a British poet.  You likely have read it.  It starts “ If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs; if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting too.”  Then it continues with wonderful advice like “….walk with kings nor lose the common touch.”  The conclusion is that, if you can do all those things, “you’ll be a man, my son.”  My grandfather gave me a framed copy of “If” when I was a young boy, and I kept it hanging on my wall most of my adult life. 

Several years ago my friend Ted Blum asked if Hank Aaron would be willing to appear in a short video to be shown ESPN style at his son’s bar mitzvah.  Hank agreed, and Ted and I drove to his house to do the very short video on Ted’s smart phone.  On the way, Ted asked me what to expect.  I told him we would tell Hank it would only take a couple of minutes but we would then be sitting there talking to Hank the next two hours in what would become a memory for our lifetimes.  He then asked what Hank was like.  I told him that Hank reminded me to the poem “If”, that he had all the positive qualities that a kind and thoughtful person should have.

When we arrived at Hank’s house, he was sitting in his den reading a coffee table size book.  A month before I had been in Washington with Hank for the dedication of his portrait at the National Portrait Gallery.  Such a dedication is a glorious occasion that takes an entire weekend of receptions, presentations, and celebration.  The Gallery commemorates it by sending out a picture book of the weekend’s activities.  When Ted and I visited, Hank had just received the book of his weekend in Washington.  He wanted to show it to us.  When he opened the first page, there was the poem “If”.   I asked Hank if they had just randomly put it there.  He told us that it was his favorite poem, that he tried to model his life based on its message.  Ted and I just looked at each other.  It was one of those moments that reinforce the idea that coincidence is simply God’s way of remaining anonymous.   A poem that was written more than a century before was the model for the life of one of America’s most iconic figures.  Wow.

Writing is a magical potion that can live on forever.  Let’s remember that and do the best job we can whenever we are writing.  What we write might influence someone we will never know.