A Writer's Moment: 'Distilling the action into a tasty tale'

A Writer's Moment: 'Distilling the action into a tasty tale': “A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.”  – Raymond Chandler   Born in Chicago on July 23, 1888 Chandler started his wr...

'Distilling the action into a tasty tale'

“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.” – Raymond Chandler

 

Born in Chicago on July 23, 1888 Chandler started his writing career out of desperation after losing his job during the Great Depression.  Finding he had a great knack for writing crime stories he started as a magazine writer for several years before devising his first novel – the longtime bestseller (it’s still in print and selling steadily) The Big Sleep in 1939.

 

Chandler had 7 novels published, including Double Indemnity and The Long Goodbye – considered a masterpiece in the genre and named one of the top 100 novels of the 20^th Century.   A founder of the “hard-boiled school of detective fiction,” Chandler’s protagonist Philip Marlowe was made even more famous through the acting of Humphrey Bogart, who played him in a number of films adapted from Chandler’s works.  

 

Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond books, said Chandler offered “some of the finest dialogue written in any prose” and mystery writer Paul Levine described Chandler's style as the "literary equivalent of a quick punch to the gut."

 

“Write ‘actively,’” Chandler said.  “And when in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Better to be right . . . or wrong?'

A Writer's Moment: 'Better to be right . . . or wrong?':   “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”    – Aldous Huxley    Best known for  Brave New W...

'Better to be right . . . or wrong?'

 

“Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”   – Aldous Huxley

 

 Best known for Brave New World, considered by most critics as one of the ten best language novels of the 20^th Century, and for the non-fiction book The Doors of Perception, Huxley was born into a family of writers and educators in London, England in July of 1894.  

 

Writing by the age of 10, he was editing the distinguished magazine Oxford Poetry in his early 20s before starting his creative writing career doing short stories and poetry.  At age 30 he turned to novels, all successful, though none so much as Brave New World, released in 1931.  Following the novel’s immense success, he became a travel writer and his travel books are still considered among the best ever written.  Huxley finished his writing career as a television and film scriptwriter in the United States, where he died in 1963.   

 

Widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time, Huxley was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Of Brave New World, he said he wrote it out of fear that mankind would lose individual identity in the future and needed to be prepared.  

 

“The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong,” he said.  “The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Well, Imagine That'

A Writer's Moment: 'Well, Imagine That':   “If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering .” – Tom ...

'Well, Imagine That'

 

“If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.” – Tom Robbins

 

Born in Blowing Rock, NC in July of 1932, Robbins went to school in Virginia and after a stint in the military started his writing as a journalist.  His creative writing career started in the mid-1960s when he rejected an opportunity to write a book about art but told the publisher that he had an idea for a novel.  The publisher gave him a chance and the result was the bestseller, Another Roadside Attraction.

 

Robbins, who died in 2025, wrote 8 bestselling novels, many dozens of short stories and essays, and 2 nonfiction books, including the self-declared “un-memoir” Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life.  Heading up the list of his many successes is his irreverent novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, also made into a popular movie.  Ultimately, Writer’s Digest named him one of the 100 Best Writers of the 20^th Century.

 

“The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination,” Robbins said.  “If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.'”

A Writer's Moment: 'It's a search for order'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's a search for order':   “For me, poetry is always a search for order.”  – Elizabeth Jennings Jennings was born in England on this date in 1926 and was lauded f...