Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Goodbye, Mr. Briggs
 |
| A STACY BRIGGS III: The guardian of meticulous |
the worlds of science, science fiction and fantasy, and whom many fans of the genre – if not the general public – knew.
This time that’s not the case.
Few people will know who A. Stacy Briggs III was, and why should they?
He wasn’t an actor in some genre TV show or movie – though he was quite the character. Nor was he a creator of a comic book, novel, film, or television series beloved by us geeks. He wasn’t even one the many behind-the-scenes talents who help produce one of those things. In fact, as far as I know, other than a love of reading, Stacy Briggs had nothing to do with the worlds of science fiction and fantasy.
So why, then, am I placing him up there with the likes of Ray Bradbury, Leonard Nimoy and Stephen Hawking and devoting my monthly column to him?
Because, as well as being a friend, colleague and sometimes mentor, Stacy Briggs was a true master of his craft: writing.
You see Stace – as those who knew him often called him – devoted his life to newspaper journalism and the telling of stories. He may not have been known by many outside the newsroom, but for the last 50 years, the citizens of Bucks County, Pa benefited from his work at The (Doylestown) Intelligencer and the Bucks County Courier Times.
As a fellow former colleague of ours said at his recent memorial service, “Stacy was the guardian of meticulous.” Nary was there ever a coma out of place in the stories he edited or the pages he proofed. And forget about a grammar or spelling errors. Nothing got past his infamous red pen.
Lord only knows how many times he used it on me and on the stories and pages we produced together. I always tried to produce clean copy, but no matter how many times I went over my own story or read over copy from another reporter, Stace would always find something I missed.
This could be annoying, especially when we were pushing deadline (or past it), but I always appreciated that desire to get everything right. While he would rib me from time-to-time (okay, it was more like constantly) about my less than perfect spelling, it never came from a mean place nor a desire to prove he was better than me or anyone else. He just wanted everything to be correct, and as Mrs. BlueScream often reminds me, Stacy and I did share one common trait. We were/are both CDO (which is similar to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, only the letters are in the correct order – the way they should be).
In fact, one of my fondest memories of working with him came one summer Saturday evening, when we were putting out the Sunday paper. Mrs. BlueScream had given me a new t-shirt for my birthday, on the front of which was the saying: “Is anal retentive hyphenated?”
I had worn the t-shirt just for him, and as soon as he saw me in it, I remember his brow furrowing and him casting me one of his disapproving looks and saying, “That’s NOT funny.”
But Stacy was more than just the newsroom’s grammar Nazi and punctuation police. He cared just as deeply about getting the facts of a story correct as he did about the way a story was told. Like most decent copy editors, Stacy could take the worst piece of writing and polish it until it shone. Yet unlike some other editors, he took time to coach the writers he worked with to produce better copy so he didn’t have to do that.
At his memorial service, person after person told stories of how Stacy influenced them: from the former sports editor who’d occasionally receive marked up copies of his section with Stacy’s comments on how to make the stories better to a reporter who said that when she first started at the paper, he recommended that she use the same “voice” she used in her columns in her news stories to make them more interesting and compelling.
All these stories started me thinking about all the ways Stacy influenced me and my writing. It took a while, but I suddenly realized that my often obsessive desire to find exactly the right words or phrase to get my point across comes from my time working with him. Yes, it often slows me down as I write and rewrite the same few lines struggling to get them just right. Yet I know in the end the time I take to do that is worth it, because it’s improved my writing ten-fold.
So for his contribution to the craft of story-telling and his influence on me to always strive to get it right (or write?), I think A. Stacy Briggs III does belong enthroned among the superstars of sci-fi/fantasy, that I’ve written about in the past. Because anyone so devoted to his craft and to helping other story-tellers deserves some recognition even if he shunned it during his life.
I just hope that he’d approve of this story and find no reason to red pen it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)