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What Would You Have Done?

By Roy Peter Clark

I am sharing with you a personal essay I wrote for Sunday's St. Petersburg Times. (If any of you would like to link to it, or reprint it, just let me know.) The essay was several years in the making. I had told the story aloud many times, but never figured out how to write it, until now. To use a couple of different metaphors, some stories have to ripen before they are ready to be picked from the tree; or maybe they have to simmer a while on the back burner before they're ready to serve.

But now it is written and published. It describes an encounter in the men's room of a Catholic Church with an 8-year-old boy. I'd be interested in your reaction to the piece. Does it work for you? Can you identify some of the writing tools I used in the process? And, most of all, do you think I did the right thing? Would you have acted differently? What if the boy were your son?

By the way, I think we should ask readers more often what they think, not just online, but in the newspaper. Help prove me right. -- rpc

Full post as published by Writing Tools on October 04, 2007 (boomark / email).