In the haste of meeting deadlines and worrying about the sensitivity of dinnertime television viewers, I inevitably fear my stories don't adequately convey The Story. In the best of circumstances, writing is an agonizing process, and television writing is the hardest of all – you're constantly in the bondage of brevity. Every day, I'm forced to conduct major surgery on my television scripts. I agonize over the proper adjective, the proper metaphor, the proper turn of phrase that makes the reader (or in our case, the listener) get it. But the images in Haiti are so powerful, words fail to do them justice. Sometimes I find myself almost believing in the worst cliche ever uttered – "a picture is worth a thousand words." Yes, in television, the pictures will always win out, sometimes to the chagrin of the writer who seeks to put the images in context.

I'm thinking now of our story about our taxi driver, Thomas Laguerre. We showed the destruction, and we heard a local's impressions of it. But what you didn't experience from that story is the pervasive smell of the place – that unmistakable smell. Often it's a combination of woodsmoke and burning trash and body odor and decay. The smell of death. Thomas spoke of the piles of bodies that had been put along the streets "like trash." Those bodies were hauled away to a mass grave near a landfill.

Like trash.

We didn't see any piles of bodies, only heaping piles of rubble and dust baking in the tropical sun. And there are no doubt countless bodies still entombed in the endless rubble. We saw much more than a collapsed school house, a flattened car, and buildings that looked like rock slides, as I related in my television story. Goodness knows we saw and smelled and felt and thought so much more. Port-au-Prince defies description. Soldiers told us late Friday night that it looks like bombed-out areas of Baghdad. My partners, Tom Normanly and Tony Gupton, liken it to a movie set ("It just doesn't look real!") or a city just after a nuclear bomb. Port-au-Prince is all those things. Writers everywhere – if I know true writers at all – are agonizing over how to describe such a place. Their senses are overwhelmed, and putting that in words is devilishly challenging. Maybe there are no metaphors for post-earthquake Port-au-Prince. It needs no comparisons. It is alone in the universe. Until you're here, walking the streets of this graveyard of a city, you can never fully appreciate it.