A Writer's Moment: 'Just telling a good story'

A Writer's Moment: 'Just telling a good story':   “I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my workday is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an...

'Just telling a good story'

 

“I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my workday is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.” –  David Eddings

 

Born in Spokane, Washington on this date in 1931, Eddings made that statement shortly before his death in 2009.  And the writings about which he spoke were several fantasy series’ mostly created in partnership with his wife Leigh.  

 Eddings grew up in the Puget Sound area and that rugged region became the setting for some of his early (and moderately successful) stories, like High Hunt, but it was in the Fantasy genre’ that he made his mark.   His call to the world of fantasy came from a doodled map he drew one morning over coffee - a doodle that became the geographical basis for a world he called Aloria.

 

A terrific chess player, too, Eddings took Leigh’s suggestion that he incorporate elements of chess into his books.  Combining that with the new world he imagined led to he and Leigh writing 5 best-selling series, starting in 1982.  Their last, The Dreamers, ended in in 2006 after she died following a series of strokes.   The Dreamers featured characters who could use their dreams to foresee visions of the future.  His tales often seemed prophetic but David pooh-poohed those who held him up as a visionary.

 

“I'm a storyteller, not a prophet,” he said.  “I'm just interested in telling a good story.”

A Writer's Moment: It's finding that 'right word' combination

A Writer's Moment: It's finding that 'right word' combination:   “Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary - how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one...

It's finding that 'right word' combination

 

“Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary - how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
 

Born in July of 1804, Hawthorne became one of the prominent mid-19^th Century American writers, primarily through tales about his native New England. His fictional works, labeled by some as "Dark romanticism," have themes centering on the inherent evil and sin of humanity with moral messages and deep psychological complexity embedded in them.

 

His most prominent story that has lasted through the ages, is his tale of adultery, The Scarlet Letter.  It’s success catapulted him from near obscurity into the center of the New England writing movement that included such prominent writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  He took advantage of his new popularity to rapidly publish The House of the Seven Gables, Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, and a new version of Twice-Told Tales, which hadn't succeeded in its earlier release.

 

The great-great grandson of one of the judges at the Salem Witch Trials, Hawthorne wrote often about Puritanic themes and espoused being pure, accurate and meticulous, especially when it came to the power that writers' words can convey.   

“Accuracy," he said, "is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy of dishonesty.  Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

A Writer's Moment: The 'Ongoing Gleam' of hope

A Writer's Moment: The 'Ongoing Gleam' of hope:   Francis Scott Key, 1779-1843, was a lawyer and amateur poet from Georgetown, Washington, D.C., when he wrote the poem “The Defence of Fort...

The 'Ongoing Gleam' of hope

 

Francis Scott Key, 1779-1843, was a lawyer and amateur poet from Georgetown, Washington, D.C., when he wrote the poem “The Defence of Fort McHenry” that gave us our nation’s national anthem. 

 

Key had been sent to negotiate the release of American prisoners aboard one of the British ships in the Baltimore Harbor but instead was detained aboard the ship as the British prepared to bombard Fort McHenry and capture the city.  Unable to do anything but watch the bombardment – on the night of September 13–14, 1814 – he saw at dawn that the American flag still flew above the embattled fort and excitedly reported the outcome to the other prisoners being held on the ship.

 

Then, inspired, he wrote his famous poem about the experience – the first stanza becoming our anthem.  For Saturday’s Poem, here are the first two stanzas (there are 4 stanzas in the complete poem) of Key’s later re-titled,

 

The Star Spangled Banner 

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,   

O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming;   

And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;   

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave   

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?       

 

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,   

Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes, 

What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,   

As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?   

Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,   

In full glory reflected now shines on the stream;   

‘Tis the star-spangled banner; O long may it wave 

O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!       

A Writer's Moment: 'It was the key to success'

A Writer's Moment: 'It was the key to success':   “Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of you...