BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOY OF WRITING

"Alex Trocchi urged aspiring writers to go off and spend a year playing pinball. I always thought that this was verygood advice, but I could never explain even to myself, why it made such sense..."

Tom McCarthy. TYPEWRITERS BOMBS JELLYFISH
(New York: New York Review Books,2017)
**
"Anybody that admires Thomas Wolfe can be expected to like good fiction only by accident."
                     Flannery O'Connor
**
To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras. -Arthur Koestler
**

ALLAN GURGANUS ON HIS NOVEL WHITE PEOPLE 

" I’d always been told to write about what I know. And, if I know anything about anything, it’s a scrap or two about white people. How we are obsessed by rules but attracted to leaders who break them best. How we take pride in all our ancestors accomplished but accept no blame for everything they got wrong. As you remember, Rocky Mount was and is sixty-per-cent African American, so our childhoods accepted that as a universal. Don’t all workers come by bus from one side of town to clean and cook for the other? The employed made life seem possible and dignified for the employers. This was as acknowledged if ignored as oxygen is acknowledged and ignored."

interviewed in The New Yorker. By Megan Mayhew Bergman
April 23, 2023

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/how-allan-gurganus-became-a-writer

WHOOPING CRANES & ADVENTURE WRITERS

“Along with the whooping crane, the adventure story has been having a hard time of it in the country. The two seem to have followed the same pattern of decline. In the days of the open frontier, when James Fenimore Cooper was writing the first notable American adventure stories, whooping cranes were as numerous as buffalo. Ever since then, however, things have been getting rougher and rougher. At last count there were less than fifty of the big birds alive. Even so, that’s a lot more whooping cranes than there are good adventure stories.”

Hamilton Bass in The New Yorker (June 4, 1949)

**
From a Brief Review in The New Yorker

"The gloom that pervades this absorbing novel is such that 
the only comfortable room m.Simenon shows us is the parlor
in the whorehouse."

"In Brief". Uncle Charles Has Locked Himself Out by Simenon.
The New Yorker (March 7, 1988)
**

THE BEST PART OF WRITING A NOVEL

When I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I talk about point of view I am really talking about the perception of detail, and when I talk about detail I'm really talking about character, and when I talk about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries."

James Wood. How Fiction Works (2008)

**

PETER USTINOV’S DEDICATION OF HIS BOOK
LITTLE ME

                       ‘To all those, who
                       by accident or design
                    have not been included
                         in this book

**

STORY MEANS MORE THAN JUST NARRATION OR PLOT

“ I guess if there’s one thing I really care beyond anything else in the writing world , the main obsession is the story. I don’t mean to sound so simple because it’s so complex, but still, the story’s it for me. Story means more than just narration or plot. It means Aboutness . In Huckleberry Finn, the story’s more than Huck being on a raft on the river, it’s the  Aboutness – the things that surround the boy along the way – that makes the story.”

Tim O’Brian

PETER WILD: What is your favourite part of the writing
                         process?

JULIAN BARNES:  “I think that favourite point is when you are about a quarter of the way into the first draft and you think – Yes, there is a novel here, and yes, I have got a pretty rough idea of where it’s going and how long it will be and how long it will take, and I’ve got this rich 
and wonderful period of work ahead of me. Then you get to the end of the first draft and that’s when the real work has to begin.”

Peter Wild. From Bookmunch.co.uk (June 3, 2020)
**

PULLED OVER BY THE GRAMMAR POLICE

I was giving my poem the gas ;
90 mph in an adverb free zone !
Only one mad dash --
And an & off the beaten track
Between me and my ability to make sense.

I came out of a comma, 
Pausing to overcome
A near death experience...
Ellipses galore & a pair of theses
In (                    )
When the grammar police pulled me over
For punctuation littering.

I shd have known better,
To toss  ampersands 
 & ellipses ...around...
As if there were no tomorrow &
Tomorrow & tomorrow &
Tomorrow & tomorrow etc. et. al
In italics. Forgive me, Father

For I have sinned.
Pulled over by the Grammar Police,

I was giving my poem the gas ;
90 mph in an adverb free zone !
Only one mad dash --
On & off the beaten track
Between me and my ability to make sense.

I came out of a comma, 
Pausing to overcome
A near death experience...
Ellipses galore & a pair of theses
In (                    )
When the grammar police pulled me over
For punctuation littering.

I shd have known better,
To toss  ampersands 
 & ellipses ...around...
As if there were no tomorrow &
Tomorrow & tomorrow &
Tomorrow & tomorrow etc. et. al
In italics. Forgive me, Father

For I have sinned.


Louis Phillips