The Power of Words. Arial Sabar: Sometimes, ignorance makes for blissful writing

7.28.99
Arial Sabar: Sometimes, ignorance makes for blissful writing

Related: It's the state's fault, or so they claim

        This was a deadline story about a little-known Rhode Island General Assembly body that decides whether to pay people for damage they claim to have suffered at the state's hands: tires pierced by potholes, cars crumpled by run-ins with deer, slacks torn by a loose nail on a courthouse bench.
        I was assigned the story because I know little about the State House (I was just filling in for a vacationing reporter, Jon Saltzman) and Bureau Manager Kathy Gregg didn't want to throw me into anything too complicated. The Committee on Accounts & Claims was having its first meeting of the year, and I was told to go cover it for the next day's paper. "Have fun with it," Kathy said.
        So I decided to capitalize on my ignorance and write the story from the perspective of a complete outsider to this "annual ritual in which the distraught, the injured and the bereft take their case" to the State House.
        The whole idea of legislators deciding whether a three-point buck that collides with someone's car qualifies as a "state deer" seemed absurd to me. So I tried to write the story with a tongue-in-cheek tone and a certain (attempted) sense of wry detachment: "It was the opinion of the committee's clerk and chief investigator...that the deer that reduced Palardy's car to a scrap heap on Route 4 in North Kingstown in October most certainly was not."
        I took no more than a sentence to describe each of the wierder claims on the committee's agenda. That's all you need for a story like this; it keeps the tone light, and the story moving.
        This story made me realize that sometimes the most readable stories are those approached from a kind a ignorance. If you are intimately familiar with a subject, take a big step back before writing so that what catches your eye is in sync with what is likely to catch the reader's.

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