A Writer's Moment: Loving the 'conversation' between writer and reader

A Writer's Moment: Loving the 'conversation' between writer and reader: “The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and d...

Loving the 'conversation' between writer and reader

“The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.” – Garth Stein

 

Born in Los Angeles on this date in 1964, Stein is the author of The Art of Racing in the Rain, which has sold more than 4 million copies in 35 languages, and spent more than three years on the New York Times bestseller list.    

 

Stein’s career actually began in films where he was a documentary filmmaker directing, 
editing and/or producing several award-winning films, including The Lunch Date and The Last Party.   

 

Also co-founder of the nonprofit Seattle7Writers – dedicated to energizing readers and writers and their communities by providing funding, programming and donations of free books – he has written several novels and children’s books as well as more screenplays.  His latest novel is A Sudden Light.

 

“I'm a writer because I love reading,” he said.  “I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book – sort of a neutral ground.  A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.”

A Writer's Moment: It's 'the texture of the thing'

A Writer's Moment: It's 'the texture of the thing':   “What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And...

It's 'the texture of the thing'

 

“What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” – Joan Didion

 

Born in California on this date in 1934, Didion said writing was not on her radar screen in her early years.  “I didn’t want to be a writer,” she said.  “I wanted to be an actress.  I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse.  It’s make-believe.  It’s performance.“

As a senior at UC-Berkeley she entered an essay-writing contest for Vogue magazine (on a dare) and won the national top award – a job after graduation at the magazine.  In just two years at Vogue, she worked her way up from promotional copywriter to associate feature editor, and wrote her first novel, Run, River, published in 1963.

 

She married writer John Gregory Dunne.  She and Dunne co-wrote a number of screenplays, including an adaptation of her novel Play It As It Lays and the biography of journalist Jessica Savitch Up Close & Personal.   Didion’s novel A Book of Common Prayer was widely lauded, but her most celebrated work was her heart-wrenching The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award and chronicled the year of her husband’s death and daughter’s battle with cancer.

 

Didion, who died in 2021, said she enjoyed writing nonfiction and fiction both.  “Writing nonfiction,” she said, “is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.  Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”

A Writer's Moment: 'The lives it illuminates'

A Writer's Moment: 'The lives it illuminates':   “I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.”  – A. Scott Berg   Born in Connecticut on this dat...

'The lives it illuminates'

 

“I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.” – A. Scott Berg

 

Born in Connecticut on this date in 1949, Berg is one of our premier biographers writing on the lives of Samuel Goldwyn, the founder of MGM; aviator Charles Lindbergh; actress Katherine Hepburn, and President Woodrow Wilson – his most recent book.  He’s currently researching for a book on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

 

While studying at Princeton, Berg got into writing biographies by expanding on his senior thesis about Maxwell Perkins, the Scribner’s editor for both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.  The resulting book, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, won a National Book Award and was adapted into the movie “Genius.”  A close friend of Hepburn, he wrote Kate Remembered as a biography-cum-memoir about both their friendship and Hepburn’s acting career.

 

Berg said he set a goal at age 22 to write “a series of biographies about great 20^th Century American cultural figures from different parts of the country.”   So far, he’s done 5 – one about every 8-10 years.  

 

 “I am a compulsive worker,” he said.   “But I'm also a compulsive relaxer.”

A Writer's Moment: It's 'the most notable moment'

A Writer's Moment: It's 'the most notable moment': "In every phenomenon, the beginning remains always the most notable moment.  Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain,...