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

ADVICE ON BECOMING A WRITER

"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)
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"Anybody that admires Thomas Wolfe can be expected to like good fiction only by accident."
                     Flannery O'Connor
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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)

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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)

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PETER USTINOV’S DEDICATION OF HIS BOOK
LITTLE ME

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

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ABOUTNESS

“ 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
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from an interview with Julian Barnes

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)
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Unpublished Letter to the New York Times Book Review

Dear Editors:

Poet and novelist Erika L. Sanchez "wishes more authors would
 write about money." I wonder how authors are expected to write
 about something they see so little of? In a New York Times article some years back "According to the survey results, the median pay  for full-time writers was $20,300 in 2017, and that number decreased
 to $6,080 when part-time writers were considered. "
    I doubt that the income of writers is much better today.

Sincerely,
Louis Phillips
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WRITERS & INTERRUPTIONS
 
“I have spent the greater part of my life, more than fifty years, doing what I am doing now, writing in ink on a lined white pad, hoping not to be interrupted, alone and grateful for my solitude. Weekends are a waiting period, most uninvited talk (the phone, repairmen, , Jehovah’s Witnesses) drives me to distraction; national holidays are an annoyance, vacations – when I am unable to avoid them – make me impatient, unless I find a quiet place to read.”

Paul Theroux. “Diary” in London Review of Books 
(20 June 2019)
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ON DESCRIBING A PERSON

"His personality was somewhat akin to the sound a truck makes while backing up."

Alex Stone, describing fellow magician Wesley James, i
Fooling Houdini (New York: HarperCollins, 2012)

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PUBLISHING THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Work started in earnest in 1879, after Oxford University Press signed on to finance and publish the dictionary, at the time called the New English Dictionary (NED). The staff buckled down and got to work reading and researching; editor James Murray estimated the dictionary would take about 10 years to compile. In 1884, after working on the dictionary for five years, the first fascicle (meaning a part of a book) came out. It only covered the words “a” through “ant.”

History Facts  (November 12, 2024)
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXKDdHGwcnWjtXMXpKJVgGqlSD

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JULIAN BARNES

Julian Barnes
Earns
A good deal of money by writing prose.
A successful author. Alas! I am not one of those.
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ARIEL, MY ARIEL
Everyday, my Ariel.
I put the world behind me, but it shoot bacjk.
One generation & the next.
Light as sunlight thruahing
As thru the Spanish Cedars flash
Comorants magnific with their hooked beaks.
Always a fitful cornucopia
To take the breath away.
I press my life to the jumping  dayshine.
What do I demand?
More space? More freedom?
Freedom to do what? Hungering for magic,
I stand on Prospero's Isle.
Could I have been so wrong about my life?
Far out on the ocean,
Replenished & green,
One anonymous sailor
Fastens his shroud.

Louis Phillips





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