By ROY PETER CLARK

Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute was recently at the Providence Journal to discuss a story project centering on a veteran of World War II, Tommy Carden. This is the second of two parts.

Part 1: Telling stories from a different point of view

      Clark's story was written in the voice of Tommy Carden. This created some problems when Clark began doing additional research to verify Cardin's account.
      For example, Tommy got the color of the car and make of the car of his friend Joe Pacak wrong. Clark found out when he interviewed Pacak.
      "So I had some interesting writing issues and I'm sharing all of these drafts with Tommy, is this right, is that right? There were some strategic problems, there were some ethical issues."
      He said that in narrative writing he has developed two fundamental ethical principles that should be met.
      "The first is Do Not Add. Don't put anything between the quotation marks which was not said, don't add details that you did not see, even if they were probably there. The second is Do Not Deceive. Do not break a contract with the reader, where the reader is expected to think such and such could happen."
      One technique Clark used was to provide full disclosure in the introduction. It begins in the third person, explains what the story is about and tells the reader they will be hearing it in Tommy's voice. That sounds like Clark is giving the entire story line away, but he says greater writers have used the same technique.
      For instance, Shakespeare in the first 14th line of Romeo and Juliet warns that "star-crossed lovers take their lives" in the play.
      "That is an effort to distinguish my voice as the writer from the voice that we are using in the narrative. To give you a preview of the kind of story it is, and also to do my duty to fulfill a contract with the reader since I have added elements to the narrative. I think you have to take greater care than usual when you are using some extraordinary device."
      He also showed the drafts to Tommy and worked closely with him. In this way Tommy became not only a source, but a collaborator. Tom French, a writer at the St. Petersburg Times, told Clark to not only use this as a fact-checking device but as a reporting tool.
      "When the source thinks that you are all through reporting and you have done everything and now you are going to share this with them and when you do go over this he is going to remember something he failed to tell you or feel comfortable telling you something. For every occasional instance where a source has asked me to pull back a little there have been 6 or 7 deeper revelations."
      Still, when Tommy made a mistake it created an interesting writing problem. At one point Tommy told Clark that he had landed on Omaha Beach.
      "We discovered from doing the history of his battalion that they landed on Utah Beach. So what I tried to do is have conversations with Tommy, correct his misconceptions, and try to demonstrate those in the story without over-burdening the story with these corrections and not fictionalize the story. It is an ethical issue, it is an aesthetical issue."
      And how was it resolved?
      Here's the excerpt from the story:
      "I'm not sure of the exact day we landed or the exact position. I always thought it was Omaha Beach but I read something that says we landed next door on Utah Beach on July 18, 1944."
      Clark said it is important to remember that memory can be fallible.
      "Memory is fiction. Memory is fiction. We think of that in a moral way when we are trying to reconstruct a scene from the past. But we tend not to think of it when we are asking these Floridians what happened to you when you went into the voting booth. We are getting fictionalized versions of reality."
      He was also reassured by Tommy's memory at times.
      "Tommy did tell me he was an Irishman, he had a license to blarney, and I went through the Internet and found the people in his battalion and they confirmed to me most of what he was saying. They sent me an official history of the battalion and if you were to line it up with what he said I would say he was right about 80 percent of the time. That gave me a lot of confidence."