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

CELEBRATING THE PUBLICATION OF A NOVEL
WRITTEN BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR

"The first novel by a writer born in America was The Life of Harriet Stuart by Charlotte Ramsey Lennox, published in two volumes in London 1751....This novel, her first, was a semiautobiographical romance. Samuel Johnson, an eminent English writer, was a personal friend of hers and celebrated the book publication by throwing an all night party."

FAMOUS FIRST FACTS, 5th edition, edited by Joseph Kane, Steve Anzovin,nand Janet Podell (New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1998)


**

SOMETIMES A WRITER DOES NOT ALWAYS
ACHIEVE SUCCESS

When the young Robert Risken was employed as
an office boy in Joe Golden's textile company:

"Realizing that Risken wrote poetry at lunchtime, Golden offered him a promotion if he would write a lertter cum marriage proposal to Trixie Friganza, a girl in the office whom Golden was too shy to approach himself. Riskin's letter failed to grab the necessary attention and light a fire under the relationship between his boss and Trixie, and he was duly fired."

Ian Scott. Robert Riskin: The Life and Times of a Hollywood Screenwriter (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2021)
**

HOW TO GET UNSTUCK WHEN WRITING

"When I am stuck on something I'm trying to write and have exhausted all the other options --ignoring the problem, staring blankly at the problem, moving the problem around to see it's less annoying in some other location, eating all the chocolate in the house -- I eventually do what I should have done in the first place and go read some writer who is much better than I am.
   "The candidates are legion."

Kathryn Schulz. "Casting a Line: the hard-bitten genius of Norman Maclean" in The New Yorker (July8 & 15, 2024)

**
REPEATING A VERB THREE TIMES

As Galway Kinnell writes, in perhaps the only sentence in English where the same verb repeats three times in a row and still makes sublime sense: "Whatever what is is is what I want."

Mark Doty. The Art of Description (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2010)
**
"If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad."

John Benbow
**

  A guy comes home from college to find his mother sleeping with his uncle, and there’s a ghost running around. Write it good, it’s Hamlet; write it bad, it’s Gilligan’s Island.”

    Lorne Michaels

quoted by David Mamet in Bambi vs. Godzilla
 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007)
**

SCIENCE FICTION AS METAPHOR


I don’t agree with those people who think of science fiction as some kind of prediction of the future. I think it’s a metaphor for the human condition.

Brian Aldiss
  
**
CONVERSING WITH HENRY JAMES

	He talked as if every sentence had been carefully rehearsed; every semicolon, every comma , was in exactly the right place, and his rounded periods dropped to the floor and bounced about like tiny rubber balls. 
	Gertrude Atherton, on Henry James, in The Adventures of a Novelist (1932)
	
	Quoted by Dr.Mardy Grothe in his collection of quotations about sentences --
	

A BOOK DEDICATION

    To my wife 
     Signe Toksig
whose lack of interest
  In the book has been
my constant desperation,

The dedication in Francis Hackett's THE INVISIBLE CENSOR
**

"The adjective is the banana peel of the English Language."
                           Clifford Fadiman

***
"What is a question mark but what's needed to complete this thought?"

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, in The Well-Tempered Sentence
**

ON INVENTING THE COMMA
 
"We don't really know who invented the comma, but  a typical Roman sentence couldn't make it with fewer than
ten of these metrical incursions..."

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, in The Well-Tempered Sentence
 **

J.D. SALINGER

      He seemed to regard his literary success as a moral stain, It would be hard to think of a contemporary American writer whose personal life was more true to the ethos of his fiction.

      Michael Greenberg. The New York Review of Books (March 15, 2010)


ON TEACHING WRITING

“Donald Bartheme once said to me,” The trouble with teaching is you spend all your time working on someone else’s rotten manuscript when you should be working on
Your own rotten manuscript.”

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

DO NOT ATTACH A CHRONOMETER TO YOUR
TYPEWRITER OR COMPUTER

“Someone once told me a story about a man who was an editor for Playboy. He got some sort of chronometer that he attached to his typewriter. He used to write all day long, and he called a person I know and said he had been clocking himself and he was spending forty-three minutes a day at his typewriter and that’s why he put this thing on it. So he would really sit there and force himself to work. And a week later he shot himself. Of course, this is not to say that this is why he killed himself. Still, it’s something to think about.”

Nora Ephron.  “Nice to See Nora Ephron Happy in New York,” in an interview by Michael S. Lasky. Writer’s Digest (April 1974
"A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia."
                                      Iris Murdoch

**


THE DEDICATION OF FRANK SCULLY’S NON-FICTION BOOK – ROGUE’S PROFILE OF MY EMINENT CONTEMPORARIES (1943)

                       Dedicated to
                    my wife, poor wretch,      
                       and about time
**
OBSOLETE POEM #5432

All right, like the word vouchsafe,
I am obsolete.
Put  me out to pasture
With other woolly mammals,
My head a neon jukebox
Of songs no longer worth remembering.

Just read a death notice
For my first wife.
All those memories down the drain,
Like the old chemistry professor
Wanting to see our marriage license
Before he and his wife made our bed
In the guest room. 

Simple acts of kindness
Dissolving into air, 
into thin air, as if they never happened.
The professor and his wife
Came to New York, &
Treated me to supper
At a Japanese restaurant
Where the meal was cooked
Right at our table. I remember the dsy
He took me for a ride in the Cadillac
He had just bought. He was so proud
That he could afford 
On his Assistant Professor's salary,
A pink Cadillac.

Memory is such a deep pool.
How easy it is to drown in it.


Louis Phillips