A Writer's Moment: 'The Application of Common Sense'

A Writer's Moment: 'The Application of Common Sense':   “Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It&#3...

'The Application of Common Sense'

 “Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification.  As an editor, I have to be tactful, of course.” —Robert Gottlieb

 

Born on April 29, 1931, Gottlieb is both an editor AND a writer, but it’s his editorship for which he is best known, having served as editor of The New Yorker for a number of years and editor-in-chief at book giant Simon & Schuster for 30 years.

 

While at S&S, he discovered and edited Catch-22 by the then-unknown Joseph Heller, and during his years there he edited works by almost every major writer – both of fiction and nonfiction. 

Gottlieb said it was his love of reading that led to his fascination with dissecting how books were crafted.  “I was the only child, and I know my father had certain thoughts about me. He was a lawyer and extremely literary, but he would have been much happier if I had wanted to be a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer. But what I wanted to do was read.”

 

For a time he thought that also might mean that he would become a full-time writer, but he said it was something he never really wanted to be.  “I don't like writing - it's so difficult to say what you mean,” he said.   “It's much easier to edit other people's writing … and help them say what they mean.”

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: Be Proactive . . . And ‘Make Stuff Up’

A Writer's Moment: Be Proactive . . . And ‘Make Stuff Up’: “I think writers have to be proactive: they've got to use new technology and social media. Yes, it's hard to get noticed by traditi...

Be Proactive . . . And ‘Make Stuff Up’

“I think writers have to be proactive: they've got to use new technology and social media. Yes, it's hard to get noticed by traditional publishers, but there's a great deal of opportunity out there if you've got the right story.” – Ian Rankin

Rankin, the Scottish writer best known for his “Inspector Rebus” novels, did not set out to be a crime writer and, in fact, didn’t think he had “the right story” at first.  He thought his first novels Knots and Crosses and Hide and Seek were more “mainstream,” keeping with the Scottish traditions of Robert Louis Stevenson and even Muriel Spark.   And he said he was a bit disconcerted by their classification as “genre fiction,” worrying they might not draw a reading audience.

Not to worry.   So far, he’s had 30 books published and many have been both best sellers and adapted into movies.  Rankin celebrates his 61st birthday today at his home in Edinburgh where he sets most of his novels.  One of the fun things about reading his books is to learn more about that Scottish city and the little details he weaves throughout.

Rankin, whose first job was in his dad’s grocery store, 

had lots of “life experiences” (always a plus for a writer)         

before becoming a full-time novelist.  He worked as a grape-picker, swineherd, taxman, alcohol researcher (I’d definitely like to hear more about that job), hi-fi journalist, college secretary, and punk musician in a band called The Dancing Pigs.

“I am, of course, a frustrated rock star - I'd much rather be a rock star than a writer,” he said.  “Or own a record shop.  Still, it's not a bad life, is it?  You just sit at a computer and make stuff up.” 

 

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A Writer's Moment: It's A Writing Partnership

A Writer's Moment: It's A Writing Partnership: “Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not y...

It's A Writing Partnership

“Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it's you in partnership.” — Marilyn Nelson

Born on this date in 1946, poet, translator and children's book writer Nelson is author or translator of 12 books and three chapbooks.  Professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut, she is the founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a retreat center for new or emerging writers, especially poets.  

Born in Cleveland, the daughter of one of the original Tuskegee Airmen, she was brought up living on military bases, and began writing while in elementary school.  She said she gravitated to poetry and never looked back, although readers of her kids’ books say they’re glad she continued in that genre, too.   After earning a Ph.D. in English, she taught at Connecticut for many years and ultimately was honored by the State of Connecticut as its Poet Laureate – a position she held from 2001-06.

Nelson’s poetry collections include the terrific The Homeplace, which won the  Anisfield-Wolf Award and was the first of three of her books to be finalists for the National Book Award.  In 2012, the Poetry Society of America awarded her the Frost Medal “for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry,” and in 2013, she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.                                  

  

Soft spoken and thoughtful in all she says and does, Nelson said a person’s voice is as important in presenting a poem as are the words on paper.  “Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible,” she said. “They are wrong.”

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: A Testament to Perserverance

A Writer's Moment: A Testament to Perserverance: “Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years la...

A Testament to Perserverance

“Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.” –  Janet Evanovich

Born April 22,1943, Evanovich has over two hundred million books in print worldwide and is translated into over 40 languages.  After those initial struggles, she gained fame and loyal readers with her contemporary mysteries featuring Stephanie Plum, a former lingerie buyer from Trenton, New Jersey, who becomes a bounty hunter to make ends meet after losing her job.

Evanovich’s writing has combined a terrific and sometimes droll sense of humor (“If you want to cry, you're not going to like my books”) with a knack for setting up mystery, suspense and keeping her readers totally involved.  “I actually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers were sending in their ideas for titles,” she explained. 

  “What we realized is that they were smarter than us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.”

Evanovich is testament to perserverance and not giving up.  During those first 10 years of trying she had dozens and dozens of rejection letters for her first books before she finally connected with a romance novel for which she received $2,000.  “I thought it was an astounding sum.” 

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: 'They Grow From Your Life'

A Writer's Moment: 'They Grow From Your Life':   “How do poems grow?   They grow out of your life.” – Robert Penn Warren The first time I read All The King’s Men .   I was stunned by...

'They Grow From Your Life'

 “How do poems grow?  They grow out of your life.” – Robert Penn Warren

The first time I read All The King’s Men.  I was stunned by how quickly I was transported into the story and forgot that I was reading a novel and not someone’s life story.  Penn Warren, born April 24, 1905, had that remarkable ability to put his reader both into the place and into the lives of those about whom he was writing.

Founder of the The Southern Review, Penn Warren is the only person to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry, and he won that latter award twice.  His first Pulitzer, of course, came for All The King’s Men, the 1947 novel about a ruthless Louisiana politician.  It’s one of the few books to also be made into both a movie and an opera, although the movie had much more success, earning the Best Picture Academy Award and jump-starting the career of actor Broderick Crawford as the lead character Willie Stark.

In 1958, Penn Warren won his second Pulitzer for his book of poems Promises:  Poems 1954-1956, which also won the National Book Award for poetry.  And, in 1979 he was awarded his third Pulitzer for Now and Then.

Born in Kentucky near the Tennessee border, he was known as a segregationist as a young man but greatly shifted his views adopting a high profile as a supporter of racial integration – and becoming  close friends with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the 1940s he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and in 1986 he was named the first U.S. Poet Laureate.  Among his other honors were selection for the Jefferson Lecture, the federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities; the Presidential Medal of Freedom; a MacArthur Fellowship; and the National Medal of Arts.

 

Robert Penn Warren

When asked about the many poems he wrote over his lifetime, he said whenever he felt the urge to write one, he just did it:  “The urge to write poetry,” he said, “is like having an itch.  When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.”

 

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A Writer's Moment: Spring Keeps Its Turn

A Writer's Moment: Spring Keeps Its Turn:   “No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn.  April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it."   -  Hal Borland ...

Spring Keeps Its Turn

 “No Winter lasts forever, no Spring skips its turn.  April is a promise that May is bound to keep, and we know it."  -  Hal Borland

This morning’s sunshine hinted at Spring’s finally arriving.   I think late April and not March 20^th really ought to be the “official” start of Spring.   The earlier time mocks us with repeats of snow, ice and blustery days that say anything but Spring being in the air.  Whereas the morning air on these late-April days not only touches us with a soft caress but also is filled with the songs of hundreds of birds – something I don’t recall at all during those March "pretender Spring" days.

For a slight variation on Saturday's Poem, here are a few words by the bards written about and in April, such as Borland’s above and those below to both describe and “Welcome Spring.”  

 "The sun was warm but the wind was chill.  You know how it is with an April day."
-  Robert Frost

 "I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden."
-  Ruth Stout

 

"The year's at spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill sides's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his heaven -
All's right with the world!"
-  Robert Browning

A Writer's Moment: Help Save The Earth

A Writer's Moment: Help Save The Earth:   On Earth Day, statements worth pondering from three wonderful writers.                   The Old Man's Wrinkle...

Help Save The Earth

 

On Earth Day, statements worth pondering from three wonderful writers. 
               

The Old Man's Wrinkles, a rock formation near Keystone in the Black Hills  
  

“We are as much alive as we keep the earth alive.” – Chief Dan George

“There are places which exist in this world beyond the reach of imagination.” – Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness

“It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before.” – Kent Haruf, West of Last Chance

Take a few minutes to do even the simplest things to help save our earth.  Pick up a few scraps of paper.  Drive just a few miles less.  Preserve a single glass of water, or contribute to a fund working on behalf of bringing clean, safe water to remote parts of our globe.  Each of us has a part to play, and if you are among those who can communicate to others through your words, today would be a wonderful day to share some of those words on the earth’s behalf.  She is, after all, the only place we have on which to reside.

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: Make Your Words Accessible

A Writer's Moment: Make Your Words Accessible:   “ I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large ...

Make Your Words Accessible

 “I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people - to take them through the argument by dramatizing the circumstances in which these issues are being discussed.” – Sebastian Faulks

  

Born on April 20, 1953, British novelist, journalist and broadcaster Faulks is best known for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He has also published such contemporary novels as A Week in December  and the James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care for which he won the British Book Awards “Popular Fiction Award.”

Also honored by the British Crown for his lifetime contributions to English Literature, he has had the rare accolade of being tabbed as “popular and literary at the same time.” English theatre, film and television director Trevor Nunn called Faulks' novel, Human Traces "A masterpiece, one of the great novels of this or any other century."      

A leading advocate for “read before you write,” Faulks advises writers to be strong readers first.   “I don't know how you can understand other people or yourself if you haven't read a lot of books. I just don't think you're equipped to deal with the demands and decisions of life, particularly in your dealings with other people.”

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A Writer's Moment: Writing's 'Freedom and Flexibility'

A Writer's Moment: Writing's 'Freedom and Flexibility': “The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I'd come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment right...

Writing's 'Freedom and Flexibility'

“The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I'd come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment right away, interview somebody, turn the story in by 9:30, and have the finished story in the paper that landed on my desk by noon.” – Margaret Haddix

Anyone who’ ever worked in journalism – particularly on “breaking news” – knows the reporter’s routine about which Haddix is speaking.  “Write tight and write quick” are the daily mantras for reporters.  The native Ohion (born in April 1964) studied at Miami of Ohio before starting her writing career as a reporter in Indiana – writing for newspapers in both Fort Wayne and Indianapolis before making her very successful switch to creative writing in the mid-1990s.

Today she’s best known for her series’ The Missing and The Greystone Secrets and her best-selling books Running Out of Time and The Girl With 500 Middle Names.  Since switching from journalism to creative writing she has authored nearly 50 books and won the                                              International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award for her body of work. 

“Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.  (In creative writing) I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.”

 

After three decades as a creative writer, she said she prefers the style.    “It's just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story,” she said.  “I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want.”

 

 

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A Writer's Moment: Reflections On Our Writings

A Writer's Moment: Reflections On Our Writings:   “A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.” – Stendhal Marie-Henri Beyle, who used the pseudonym Stendhal, is one of the most or...

Reflections On Our Writings

 “A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.” – Stendhal

Marie-Henri Beyle, who used the pseudonym Stendhal, is one of the most original and complex French writers of the first half of the 19th century, chiefly known for his works of fiction. Perhaps his finest novel is the 1830 work The Red and the Black from which the above quote comes.

A century and a half later, Tim O’Brien said that he thought about writers like Stendhal who had proceeded him, and what they said about creating good fiction led him to create acclaimed works like Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried.   

Reflecting on his writing, he noted:

“A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.”

  

Tim O’Brien                                                       Stendhal

Wise words from two great writers as we contemplate our writers’ moments.