I spent Sunday afternoon at Morgenstern’s where Indiana University journalism professor Tom French and author Valerie Bauerlein held court. Bauerlein has written a book, her first, about the lurid, dramatic scandal that shook South Carolina a few years back. The scandal culminated in the downfall of one of the state’s most powerful, storied families.
The Devil at His Elbow recounts the rise and fall of the Murdaugh dynasty, a clan of attorneys stretching back several generations. The Murdaughs essentially ran a five-county region of South Carolina; their realm was referred to as Murdaugh Country by locals and those in the rest of the state. (The name is pronounced MURR-dock.)
Bauerlein (L) & French.
Scion Richard Alexander Murdaugh, known as Alex, was accused of running a vast criminal enterprise in South Carolina; his alleged sins including fraud, embezzlement, and money laundering. Then, in 2023, Alex Murdaugh was convicted of killing his wife and 22-year-old son, shooting them to death in the family’s hunting lodge.
Bauerlein, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, became obsessed with the case. She’s from North Carolina and specializes in writing about small towns and southern politics and culture. This being her first book, she reached out to a lot people to help and guide her through the process. One of those people was Tom French, himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.
I found her talk particularly meaningful as I’m working on a book about the history of radio station WFHB. One of the pearls of wisdom Bauerlein offered was directed toward the Media School students in the crowd. A lot of journalism students, she said, think great writing makes a good book. Not so, she advised, it’s the reporting that makes the writing — and the book — good. If you haven’t done your reporting, it doesn’t matter how flowery, how beautiful, how creative your writing is. Bauerlein went on to describe her almost fetishistic dedication to the story, the details, the facts, and, most important, the people in her book.
In fact, she was so possessed by the minutia of the Murdaugh case and the family’s story (several other Murdaughs have run afoul of the law over the years, often using their influence to avoid consequences) that Tom French for one had to reel her in. He advised her to cool it several times, once telling her, “Don’t call up anybody else, okay?”
How true! I keep a sheet of paper on display at my desk. It reads “It’ll never be perfect.” It’s an outgrowth of a lesson I learned long ago: no creative work is ever “done.” There’s always one more thing to do, another source to call, a better word to find, a smoother transition, or a snappier title. The writer, the painter, the sculptor, the songwriter has to say “That’s it! No more. I’m done.” It might be the hardest task involved with creating.
As for the “great writing” that aspiring authors think they have to do, the truth is great writing can get in the way. Case in point: at one point in my book-in-progress, I had to explain a technical aspect of radio broadcasting. I labored over it and came up with three lengthy paragraphs, about 250 words. Hell, my explanation was almost poetry. It was beautiful; it flowed like music. And — icing on the cake — it was an exhaustive description of the technology. Perfect, right?
Hell no. From the moment I banged the last period I knew it was way too long. I didn’t care that I’d spent an entire morning composing it. I knew I needed to put it on a crash diet. I went to sleep on it and the next morning wrote the entire explanation in a single sentence, 20 words long.
I simply allowed myself to trust my potential readers. I’m giving them everything they need to know and won’t bore the bejesus out of them no matter how flowery my prose is.
Here’s another little display of mine, this one on my laptop’s desktop.
I happen to be reading the biography of one of TV’s most famous celebrities. It’s written by a noted biographer who’s penned books about any number of TV, movie, and music titans. And it violates every single one of the above commandments.
And — you know what? — the book’s a dreadful bore.