Editing... everything.

I've been a writer pretty much all my life. I can be a reporter when that skill is needed, but I'm really a wordsmith at heart.

Writing may sound like a fun profession, maybe even a bit glamorous. In truth, for most of us, it is neither. This isn't a profession you take on because you CAN write. It's a profession you take on because you HAVE to write. You write because you just can't help yourself.

Reporters seem to have a need to dig out a story more than to tell it. Writers have to dig out a story, too, but the focus isn't the same. The difference seems to lie in a compulsive need to compose -- a fascination with how words fit together to translate thought and feeling.

Getting words to work and feel as they should can be incredibly difficult and frustrating. Yet that's what a writer feels compelled to do. The hardest work in crafting sentences is in the editing. You write, re-write, edit over and over again.

Any conscientious writer can look at words he/she edited a dozen times six months ago and still find lots of ways to improve. Much of the improvement comes in paring down -- simplifying. The most elegant writing is very simple. It's astonishing what you can cut away and still tell a story well.

I don't consider myself a truly good writer. There are plenty of writer's out there whose work I'd rather read. But being even an adequate writer is a lot of hard work.

Not that I'm complaining. To be allowed into a life, and to share in the telling of it, is a privilege. All storytellers know that.

Telling a story in an honest way can be a very emotional process. Doing so requires getting into the head and heart of a topic, of a situation, of another person. You have to truly feel the emotions, feel the impact yourself, in order to write about them accurately and in a way that translates.

A raw sensitivity, a heart for a story and the people in it, are characteristic. As good as those traits may be for storytelling, however, they're not so great for living out day-to-day life.

Honey Dot Comb: Excellent photos of a beekeeper

Honey Dot Comb: Excellent photos of a beekeeper

See Dr. Jim Stovall in action with his honey bees in fabulous pics by photographers from UT's SCOOP magazine.

Walnut Weather

It's walnut weather in Tennessee. On my morning walk I spotted several walnuts, still in hulls, beneath trees in my neighborhood.

Dark spots on the green hulls reminded me of elementary school, and of the boys who would come to class with dark-stained hands this time of year. They had been hulling walnuts. Those stains would stay around for several days -- you can't scrub them off -- but the boys never seemed to mind. Walnuts were easy money for country boys with time on their hands.

The hulls, of course, are designed to protect and nurture the walnut seed until it can get implanted in the ground. They aren't easy to remove.

It is possible to speed up the process, though. On quiet country lanes it wasn't at all unusual to encounter piles of fresh walnuts across the road. When you drove your car across them, the weight from the tires helped loosen the hulls. Hard-shell American walnuts are tough enough to take the pressure.



Every couple of days, kids would clear out the old ones and put new walnuts in the road. Then, they would finish the hulling process, put the hulled nuts into sacks and save them to take to market. That's where they got the stains. There is no good way to get the hulls off except to pull the pieces off with your fingers.

I don't know the going rate for a pound of fresh walnuts these days, but many a country kid financed his Christmas presents, or maybe a new knife or bike, by picking up those much-desired nuts. Walnut-stained hands, this time of year, were a sure sign of ingenuity.