Heard it from a friend who, heard it from a friend who...

Rain falls softly outside my window. There's barely any wind. It's winter here now, our greenest season of the year.

A year ago Wednesday I saw my girlfriend off to her adventures in Biloxi. She was supposed to stay two months. Instead she stayed three, then spent just a little over two months back here before putting her possessions in storage, and drove back down the lonely highways stretching from here to the Gulf Coast. I guess she's a Mississippian now; maybe she's even developed an accent.

She's one who thinks that she never changes, that's she's always the same. And there is some consistency in her nature, that's true. But I saw massive changes in her during the two years I knew her.

There's remarkably little press coming out of the Gulf Coast these days. The national media is obsessed with the recent elections and the nation's other disaster -- the war in Iraq, so there's little interest in how our southeastern brothers and sisters are faring in their struggle to recover from the twin killer sisters -- Katrina and Rita.

Thousands of Americans do care, though, and they're the ones, like my friend, who have moved into the area on a semi-permanent basis. As far as I know, she still sleeps on her air mattress in her tiny room, with polka dot curtains in the loft of the church on Pass Road. But there's probably a whole lot of stuff I don't know about her life now.

***

I met a whole slew of young writers Saturday, some Asian American, all of whom are interested in trying to develop their long-form narrative writing style. While specific rules can and are put out there in various settings (classrooms, newsrooms, magazine offices) about what constitutes a narrative and how to construct one, it really boils down to this: Your story telling style.

Everyone has a unique story telling voice. Even if ten people read the same story out loud, it would be perceived differently depending on which words they emphasized and which rhythms inherent in the language they enhanced. This is more obvious in songs as in Pat Boone's covers of Elvis Pressley songs, etc.

It's all in the interpretation. One exercise a writer can follow is to rewrite (from memory) some ancient story. Then go back and compare what you wrote to the original source. Unless you had the story memorized (which is a different exercise), there should be some telltale evidence of your writing voice in there.

Pay attention to where and how you departed from the original, details you changed, additions you made. All of these are hints as to how your brain is wired for story telling.

It's a process not unlike that of investigative reporting, where we take special note of changes in routine, for example, to infer when our subject has changed her/his normal behavior. It's all in the pattern.

The best storytellers like solving mysteries of all sorts -- crimes, anonymous writings, math problems, and mysteries of the heart. There's a tension hanging over every story: How will it end?

-30-

You take it on the run baby
If that's the way you want it baby
Then I don't want you a-round
I don't believe it
Not for a minute
You're under the gun so you take it on the run
--Reo Speedwagon