BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOYS OF WRITING #3

"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."
                       James Ramon Jimenez

epigraph to Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 
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“Most novels deal with leisure rather than with work, with the margins of life, where the human personality is free to expand and enter into interesting relationships, rather than with the quotidian toil which , for the greater part of humanity, both define and limits existence. Even novels that are overtly about industrial life present the factory or the mine as a menacing shape in the background influencing the lives of the characters, but do not dwell for long on the actual industrial process.”

Bernard Bergonzi. Introduction to New Grub Street  by
George Gissing (New York: Penguin Books, 1968)

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DEDICATION

   I dedicate this book to all my dear friends
Without whose help, it would have been written
           In half the time.

Dedication of Hermione Gingold’s  How to Grow Old Disgracefully (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1988)

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ON REWRITING

Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline:
Be mindful, when invention fails,
To scratch your Head and bite your Nails.

Jonathan Swift. From “On Poetry: A Rapsody”

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THE ROBOT VERSION OF THE WRITER'S SELF

"In May, I was confronted with a robot version of my writer self. It was made, at my request, by a Silicon Valley startup called Writer, which specializes in building artificial-intelligence tools that produce content in the voice of a particular brand or institution. In my case, it was meant to replicate my personal writing voice. Whereas a model like OpenAI’s ChatGPT is “trained” on millions of words from across the Internet, Robot Kyle runs on Writer’s bespoke model with an extra layer of training, based on some hundred and fifty thousand words of my writing alone. Writer’s pitch is that I, Human Kyle, can use Robot Kyle to generate text in a style that sounds like mine, at a speed that I could only dream of.

opening to My A.I. Writing Robot:
A new wave of artificial-intelligence startups is trying to “scale language” by automating the work of writing. I asked one such company to try to replace me.
By Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker (July 11, 2023)
**

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. 
               Samuel Johnson
 
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ON DONALD BARTHELME FINDING A LOVELY TITLE

“If he (BARTHELME) praised himself, he detracted, and
the praise was seen to have been but a setup. One night he said, “I am going to read a story called ‘Overnight to Many Distant Cities,’ a lovely title I took from the side of a postal truck.’

Padgett Powell. “Donald Barthelme” in Indigo (New York: Catapult, 2021)

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EXAMPLE OF BAD WRITING

“Bon soir, m’sieur,” she said, speaking French.

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“The testimony of most writers suggests that the art of writing is generally a solitary effort for which applause, if any, is long deferred. It is not, I think, one of the performing arts.”
                                   George Orwell

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THE WRITER'S JOB

“…a writer’s job is to see what will happen to a stranger tomorrow. He has to plunge so deeply into his recesses that he touches off tremors that find an echo in a reader, and if he goes deep enough into the subconscious, he will
Find the future hidden there as much as the past. A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.”

Pico Iyer.  The Man Within My Head  (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)
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GRAHAM GREENE ON THE SIGN OF THE FOUR

"...one detects signs of carelessness which seem to indicate that Doyle's imagination had not yet been fully committed (perhaps it was never fully committed before he found his ideal illustrator in Sidney Paget). To take one example, a letter received 'the next day' by Miss Morstan and dated 7 July is brought hot-foot to Holmes -- in September. Surely there is more than mere carelessness in the fact that the author never bothered to make a correction in succeeding editions. It is as if he were determined to treat his own story with cavalier indifference."

Graham Greene in his introduction to The Sign of the Four
(1974)
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"If you're a writer in Dublin and you write a natch of dialogue, everyone thinks you lifted it from Joyce...it's as if you're encroaching in his area, or its a given he's on your shoulder. It gets on my nerves."
  
RODDY  DOYLE

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Richard Wright
Native Son (1940)
 
Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!
An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman’s voice sang out impatiently:
“Bigger, shut that thing off!”
A surly grunt sounded above the tinny ring of metal. Naked feet swished dryly across the planks in the wooden floor and the clang ceased abruptly.


The above is the opening to Native Son. See Mardy Grothe's superb collection on his Great Opening Lines
website. Great fun. Very insightful comments helpful
to readers and writers.

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H.G. WELLS

Wells, H.G.
Wrote many novels, e.g. 
War of the Worlds & Invisible Man.
(Say, does this Clerihew scan?)

HENRY JAMES

Henry James
Did not chase dames.
Many readers wd be glad
If he had.
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JOHN MILTON & MY CREDIT RATING

  When I consider how my money is spent,    
  How my small income, which is illergal to hide,
  Barely covers my apartment's monthly rent,
  Breaks my slender  savings,  and presents 
  Problems with my bank. Creditors chide:
   “Doth God exact day-labour? Payment denied?”
   I fondly ask for loans, but merchants, to prevent
   That murmur, soon reply, “We do not need
   Either your IOUs or bad checks; who best
   Pays cash serves us best, tho Real estate
   Is useful collateral.  Credit Cards speed
   And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
   They also serve who invest in stocks & wait.


LJP