A Writer's Moment: 'Five hundred words a day'

A Writer's Moment: 'Five hundred words a day':   “An early editor characterized my books as 'romantic comedy for intelligent adults.' I think people see them as...

'Five hundred words a day'

 

“An early editor characterized my books as 'romantic comedy for intelligent adults.' I think people see them as funny but kind. I don't set out to write either funny or kind, but it's a voice they like, quirky like me... And you know, people like happy endings.” – Elinor Lipman

  

Born in Massachusetts on Oct. 16, 1950 Lipman studied journalism at Simmons College and began her writing career as a college intern with the Lowell (MA) Sun.   Right out of college she was hired to do press releases for Boston television station WGBH, a job she held throughout the 1970s before turning to a creative writing career, starting with short stories.

 

She started writing novels in the 1990s and has written 14 to go along with two nonfiction books and a short story collection.   Her first novel, Then She Found Me, was also made into a successful movie in 2008.  Her most recent best seller is 2023’s Ms. Demeanor, a finalist for the “Thurgood Prize for American Humor.”  

 

Known for her wit and “societal observations,” Lipman’s writing advice is simple:  “Five hundred words a day is what I aim for. And I don't go on to the next chapter until I've polished and polished and polished the one I'm working on.” 

A Writer's Moment: That 'familiar daily struggle'

A Writer's Moment: That 'familiar daily struggle':   “If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, be...

That 'familiar daily struggle'

 

“If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone's notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.” – Fanny Howe

 

Born in Buffalo, NY on Oct. 15, 1940 Howe is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, presented by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet for lifetime achievement.   One of America’s “most read” experimental poets.  Also a prolific novelist, she has authored more than 30 books of poetry and prose. 

 

For Saturday’s Poem, here is Howe’s,                 

Footsteps

I have never arrived
into a new life yet.

Have you?

Do you find the squeak
of boots on snow

excruciating?

Have you heard people
say, It wasn't me,

when they accomplished
a great feat?

I have, often.
But rarely.

•

Possibility
is one of the elements.
It keeps things going.

The ferry
with its ratty engine
and exactitude at chugging
into blocks and chains.

Returning as ever
to mother's house
under a salty rain.

 

(Poetry 2011)

 

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Just use your own voice'

A Writer's Moment: 'Just use your own voice':   “I'm not aware of a cadence when writing, but I hear it after. I write in longhand, and that helps. You're clos...

'Just use your own voice'

 

“I'm not aware of a cadence when writing, but I hear it after. I write in longhand, and that helps. You're closer to it, and you have to cross things out. You put a line through it, but it's still there. You might need it. When you erase a line on a computer, it's gone forever.” – Elmore Leonard

I’ve written about Leonard in the past, but on this date of his birth (in Louisiana in 1925) I couldn’t resist reminiscing again about one of America’s greatest writers of “Realism” in the past century. 

 

A novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter, Leonard’s earliest works were Westerns (3:10 to Yuma and Hombre, for example), but he went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers.  Many of his books have been adapted into movies and TV shows; movies like Out of Sight and The Gold Coast, and mega-hit TV series like Justified and Get Shorty (also made into a movie).

 

To call Leonard’s writing “gritty,” might be an understatement, but regardless of how you classify it he shares a segment of America’s culture and dialogue that few other writers have been able to match.  To get a sense of how he developed his works, look at “Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing” (widely available on the Internet).   Perhaps his most telling rule: “If it sounds like writing . . . rewrite it.”

  

“Everyone has his own sound. I'm not going to presume how to tell anybody how to write,” he said shortly before his death in 2013.  “I think the best advice I give is to try not to write. Try not to overwrite, try not to make it sound too good. Just use your own voice. Use your own style of putting it down.”

A Writer's Moment: Words can, and do, define us

A Writer's Moment: Words can, and do, define us:   The old saying about "sticks and stones" causing harm while "words" can not or do not is, of course...

Words can, and do, define us

 

The old saying about "sticks and stones" causing harm while "words" can not or do not is, of course, hogwash. 

Over the course of our lives we have the opportunity to either say or write things that shape friendships, solve problems, or salve wounds, both real and imagined.  Words also can cause divisions, create problems, or leave lasting hurts, whether real or imagined. 

Words can, and do, define us, especially those put in our writings for posterity. 

As this poet wrote:

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Portraying the drama of the human spirit'

A Writer's Moment: 'Portraying the drama of the human spirit':   It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, ...

'Portraying the drama of the 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 England on Oct. 5, 1949 Ackroyd has written award-winning biographies of such luminaries like William Blake, Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot.  But it was his nearly two-dozen historical novels that first earned him acclaim.  Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards, Ackroyd is noted for the depth of his research and sheer volume of his work (nearly 50 nonfiction books, 19 novels, 4 books of poetry, and several television programs).   Since 2013, most of his work has been nonfiction, including this year's The English Soul: Faith of a Nation.

 

But it was fiction writing – starting with his 1982 novel The Great Fire of London – that  put Ackroyd on the writing map.   The book set the stage for a long sequence of novels dealing with the complex interaction of time and space and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place.” 

  

“I don’t think I ever read a novel until I was 26 or 27,” he said.  “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 have become the most important.” 

A Writer's Moment: It's 'the right order of things'

A Writer's Moment: It's 'the right order of things':   “My first duty is to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. O...

It's 'the right order of things'

 

“My first duty is to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.” – David Brin

 

Astro-Physicist Brin, born in California on Oct. 6, 1950, has earned a Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Award – basically a “clean sweep” of all the top awards in the Science Fiction genre and a testament to his "putting things in the right order."

His Campbell Award winning novel The Postman was adapted into a Kevin Costner feature film, and his nonfiction book The Transparent Society won both the Freedom of Speech Award (from the American Library Association) and the McGannon Communication Award.   His most recent books are Castaways of New Mojave and a short story collection, The Best of David Brin, both published in 2021.

 

A Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Brin helped establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC-San Diego.  A member of the advisory board of NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group, he is a futurist consultant for corporations and government agencies and said he’s glad he was a scientist before becoming a writer.

 

“There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors write better science fiction," he said.   "And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.” 

A Writer's Moment: 'Just . . . moving at different speeds'

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

'Just . . . moving at different speeds'

 

“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 broke into the writing world in the 1970s as a television critic for The Observer magazine.  He gained a wide reading audience with his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, first published in 1980, and his acclaimed sketches of famous 20th century figures, Cultural Amnesia.

James, who died in November of 2019, also had four novels and several books of poetry published, including The Book of My Enemy (2003), a volume that takes its title from his earlier humorous poem "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” (a term in bookselling where books are relegated to the "last gasp" discount bin).

 

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: 'Spread your voices on the wind'

A Writer's Moment: 'Spread your voices on the wind':   “S pread your voices on the wind, follow your visions, and never give up on the light within.” – White Buffalo Calf Wom...

'Spread your voices on the wind'

 

“Spread your voices on the wind, follow your visions, and never give up on the light within.” – White Buffalo Calf Woman

 

In the Land of the Lakota, the setting for many of my novels, White Buffalo Calf Woman is an integral figure in the life and lore of the people.  Portrayed as a protector and guiding spirit, she encourages all to shed darkness in and around our lives; help one another; and be mentors to the young.   

 

From “The Lore of White Buffalo Calf Woman” for Saturday’s Poem, here is,

 

                      The Hoop of the People

“When one sits in the Hoop of The People,
one must be responsible because
all of Creation is related.
The hurt of one is the hurt of all.
The honor of one is the honor of all.
And whatever we do affects everything in the Universe.”

 

White Buffalo Calf Woman gazed

                             Out upon The People as she spoke.

“If you do it that way - that is,
if you truly join your heart and mind
as One - whatever you ask for,
that's the way it's going to be.”

 

Then she faded into the night sky,

And the wind whispered.

A Writer's Moment: 'It's the foundation for success'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's the foundation for success':   “Good writing … is especially important in a subject such as economics. It is not enough to explain. The images that ar...

'It's the foundation for success'

 

“Good writing … is especially important in a subject such as economics. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

 

Galbraith, one of the great Economics’ minds of the 20^th Century, was born in Canada in October, 1908 and said that he often would hear the following lament from students in his Economics classes:  “Why do I have to take a writing class when I’m planning for a career in business (or mathematics, economics or computing, etc.)?”

 

His answer was simple: Good writing can be the foundation for success in ANY career choice.  The ability to clearly express an idea, as he states above, not only can lead to its success but the success of the person sharing that idea.

 

Galbraith also was a fan of sharing the life stories of great leaders, regardless of their background, with writing that “entertained” as much as it “conveyed” their stories.

 

“We have escapist fiction,” he said, “so why not escapist biography?”

 

A Writer's Moment: 'My job, so I did it'

A Writer's Moment: 'My job, so I did it':   “I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw n...

'My job, so I did it'

 

“I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.” – Gore Vidal

 

Vidal was born at the West Point Military Academy on this date in 1925 (his father was an officer and instructor there at the time).   He said he never wanted to be a writer, but he became one of the most well-known and sometimes controversial writers in American history.  And he took on a larger-than-life public role as an intellectual and debater, particularly against conservative writer and spokesman William F. Buckley. 

 

Called “a literary juggernaut” by The Los Angeles Times, his novels and essays are considered "among the most elegant in the English language.”  He wrote 28 nonfiction books, 32 novels, 8 plays, and 16 screenplays and teleplays.  Many were best sellers, especially his gripping historical novels Burr, Lincoln, 1876 and Empire.   And, he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for the anthology United States: Essays 1952–92.  

 

 In his later years (he died in 2012) he lamented what he termed the lack of good American writers.   “For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Being aware of life'

A Writer's Moment: 'Being aware of life':   “We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.” ― Cecil Day-Lewis   Day-Lewis, bor...

'Being aware of life'

 

“We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
― Cecil Day-Lewis

 

Day-Lewis, born in Ireland in 1904 was a poet, mystery writer, and lecturer at three of the world’s leading universities – Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard.   From 1966 to1972, the year of his death, he was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.  In addition to his myriad poems, he wrote 27 novels and 3 collections of essays as well as 5 short stories and his autobiography The Buried Day.

 

Work in writing and the arts has been carried on through his children.  His son Daniel is a multi-Academy Award winning actor; daughter Tamasin a distinguished film producer, food writer and journalist; and son Sean, who died in 2022, was a noted television critic and writer.  

 

Cecil's "best advice" to his children was: “Be aware of life.”  Daniel said that in preparing for a acting roles, he thinks: “Life comes first. What I see in the characters, I first try to see in life.”   

 

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Framing life's experiences'

A Writer's Moment: 'Framing life's experiences':   “ Notebooks allow for all kinds of record-keeping, and I kept one myself as a kid. I was attracted to mixing up words a...

'Framing life's experiences'

 

“Notebooks allow for all kinds of record-keeping, and I kept one myself as a kid. I was attracted to mixing up words and pictures freely, since that's how I think.” – Marissa Moss

Born in Pennsylvania on Sept. 29, 1959 Moss had her first picture book published at age 29.  Her mid-1990s book, Ameilia’s Notebook, broke the boundaries of what a “kid’s book” should look like and laid the foundation for many other authors who have since had similarly styled books.   Amelia's Notebook came out in the format of a journal or diary penned in a black and white composition notebook. 

 

Moss (who resides outside San Francisco) says that she loves this format because it allows her to explore the world through a child's eyes.  “I'd sent it to traditional publishers I'd been working with, but nobody knew what to do with it,” she said.  “Tricycle was this small publisher who didn't know any better and they took a chance.”  It not only earned Moss numerous awards but also legions of dedicated readers and a more than 30-book series based on Amelia’s “notebooks.”   

 

While she now has authored more than 70 books, including the wildly popular “Mira’s Diary” series about a girl who time-travels to share tales from historical settings, she said it was Amelia that made it all a possibility. 

 

 “Amelia shows that it's not what happens in life that counts, but rather how you frame it.   (It’s) how you talk about it.”