A Writer's Moment: Just omit those 'dull bits'

A Writer's Moment: Just omit those 'dull bits':   “Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.” – Clive James   Born in Australia on this date in 1939, James was an author, critic, br...

Just omit those 'dull bits'

 

“Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.” – Clive James

 

Born in Australia on this date in 1939, James was an author, critic, broadcaster, poet and humorist who lived and worked in Great Britain most of his adult life. James broke into the writing world in the 1970s as a television critic for The Observer and gained a wide reading audience with his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs.  First published in 1980, the acclaimed series, also published as a book, provided terrific biographical sketches of many of the 20th century’s most famous figures.

 

James wrote 5 memoirs, 4 novels and 10 poetry collections – including The Book of My Enemy, a volume that takes its title from his earlier humorous poem "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” (a term used in bookselling to put books in a bargain basement bin).

 

He also wrote a well-received translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and penned 7 “Epic” poems, the last “The River in the Sky” released just months before his death in 2019.

 

Humor, James said, is an essential part of every writer’s arsenal.  “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense . . . dancing.”

A Writer's Moment: 'It's the great general drama of human spirit'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's the great general drama of human spirit':   “It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a stor...

'It's the great general drama of human spirit'

 

“It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.” – Peter Ackroyd

 

Born in London on Oct. 5, 1949 Ackroyd is a biographer, novelist and historian who has authored award-winning pieces on such luminaries as William Blake, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot and Charlie Chaplin.  He’s also earned The Somerset Maugham Award for The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, and Whitbread Awards for T.S. Eliot and the novel Hawksmoor.   His novel Chatterton was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

 

A seemingly tireless writer, Ackroyd has authored 42 nonfiction books; 19 novels and 4 books of poetry, including 2025's Forgotten London: Exploring the Hidden Life of the City and this year’s Auden, a biography on the British-American poet.    Ackroyd’s first novel was 1982’s The Great Fire of London, a reworking of Dickens’ Little Dorrit.  It not only put him on the writing map but set the stage for a writing style that showcases what he calls "the spirit of place.” 

  

“I don’t think I ever read a novel until I was 26 or 27.   I wanted to be a poet … (and) had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history.  But those three elements in my life," he said, "have become the most important.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Just like a magic carpet ride'

A Writer's Moment: 'Just like a magic carpet ride':   “A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” – Caroline Gordon   ...

'Just like a magic carpet ride'

 

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.” – Caroline Gordon

 

Born in Kentucky on Oct. 6, 1895 Gordon was a novelist, literary critic and friend of nearly every famous writer of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s.  

 

A “free spirit” (her term for herself), she and husband Alan Tate often hosted major writers in their Kentucky home where “writing was the talk from dawn ‘til dark.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren and Ford Madox Ford, the writer she considered her “mentor,” were frequent visitors. 

 

Winner of both a 1932 Guggenheim Fellowship following publication of her first novel Penhally, and a 1934 O. Henry Award for her short story Old Red, later the lead work for her bestselling Old Red and Other Stories, she authored 10 novels and dozens of short stories.

 

Most of her works were set in the South and many of them autobiographical in nature, providing the world with an in-depth look at the region and the times.  The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon, published at the time of her death in 1981, was lauded by Warren “for enriching our literature uniquely in this century.” 

Gordon said she thought of her writing as a form of art.  “And art,” she said, “should never be judged.  It should be the judge of us.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Yes, you know what he means'

A Writer's Moment: 'Yes, you know what he means':   “People are always giving you credit for really wanting to say more than you said. What you've got to say, you say.” – Shel Silverste...