Inspired to Create

“Blank paper has always inspired me.” – Daniel Handler

Born on this date in 1970, writer, musician and journalist Handler is best known under the pen name Lemony Snicket, having published the children's series A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions under this pseudonym^.     Handler, who writes all of his books longhand on yellow legal pads, also has published a number of adult novels under his own name, including his first book The Basic Eight and his 2017 book All the Dirty Parts.

Handler began writing A Series of Unfortunate Events – about three orphaned children who experience increasingly terrible events following the death of their parents and burning of their home – in 1998 after struggling to get The Basic Eight published.  “My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction,” he said.   

The 13 Lemony Snicket books, however, were an immediate success worldwide, selling some 65 million copies in 41 languages while spawning a film, a video game, assorted merchandise, a mainstream movie, and a Netflix television, a big surprise to Handler.    “ I kind of always think my work is unfilmable, and when I meet people who are interested in filming it, I'm always stunned.”

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