Category Archives: Authors

Authors, Writing

Joan Didion on Her Writing

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For #NaNoWriMo, read a bit from Joan Didion:

Paris Review: You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

Didion: It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

PR: I wonder if your ethic—what you call your “harsh Protestant ethic”—doesn’t close things up for you, doesn’t hinder your struggle to keep all the possibilities open.

Didion: I suppose that’s part of the dynamic. I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I’ve already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That’s very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it’s not the ideal, it’s not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe—if I go ahead and finish it anyway—I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.

Authors, Fiction

Where’s an Encyclopedia Brown Movie?

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The case of the missing Encyclopedia Brown movie is explained by Mental Floss. Cutting to the chase a bit:

Finally, Deutsch reached a deal with HBO in 1988. The network that put Fraggle Rock on the map was interested in expanding their children’s entertainment brand and ordered a live-action Encyclopedia Brown special that led into a recurring series. Producers filmed the pilot in Provo, Utah, and the episodes were well-received.

Deutsch then did something unexpected. After just six episodes, he insisted on breaking away from the network, which puzzled them. “The idea of a producer taking his show off the air that was successful, that was so good, and so far ahead of its time that it made my career is [mind-boggling],” show co-producer Ned Kandel told The New York Times in 2005.

There’s a lot more drama in the article.

I loved these books when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure I bought them with my own money at the school book fair. I don’t remember which ones.

Authors, Fiction

Did Lewis Write Screwtape in a Larger Fictional Context?

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Do you view C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters as a standalone work? A Pilgrim in Narnia has discovered something that may indicate Lewis intended his collection of demonic letters to be part of a larger fictional context.

The Screwtape Letters begins with a letter of its own. “I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands. There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils.” Your copy of this work attributes this letter to Lewis himself, but one early edition attributes it to someone else, a character from another of Lewis’s works. Brenton Dickieson spells out more details here.

Authors

Tom Wolfe in the NYPL

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The papers of the Man in the White Suit, Tom Wolfe, have been acquired by the New York Public Library, making him “officially an Important Writer,” as Oliver Wiseman states. The papers have been made available to the public only recently. (via Prufrock)

Wolfe has not published a memoir or autobiography. In general he leaves himself out of his writing. But the career of Tom Wolfe, as told by Tom Wolfe, is the story of an outsider swimming against the tide, first in non-fiction and then in novels. Things got interesting when a strike knocked out New York’s newspapers in 1963. “You weren’t going to catch me on a picket line,” Wolfe said in an interview several years ago. “So I went to Esquire with a story about custom cars.” That article, his first magazine piece, was originally titled “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend! (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm) . . .” Tom Wolfe was already Tom Wolfe.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Writing

Writers on the Internet

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Sean Minogue writes about writers using social media for better or for worse.

Unreachability and self-seriousness used to define many of our best-known authors, but the public appetite for writerly swagger in both old and new media is at an all-time low. Jonathan Franzen, for example, continues to spark minor firestorms with his pooh-poohing of Twitter: “I see people who ought to be spending time developing their craft […] making nothing and feeling absolutely coerced into this constant self-promotion,” he said on BBC Radio 4’s Today program. Franzen is behind the curve, but not because he doesn’t like Twitter. It’s his fundamental misunderstanding of social media that makes his opinions so quaint.

In the end, social media are just other platforms for authors to speak or ignore as they wish.

Dusty cobwebbed old underwood typewriter

Authors

One of Milton’s Homes Abandoned

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Distressed room in Berkyn
The great John Milton lived in Berkyn Manor (known later as the Bull Manor), a house in Horton near Slough, Berkshire, for about three years (1636-1638). He was out of Cambridge, apparently due to a conflict with his tutor, and was living with his parents. He didn’t write his greatest works there. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. He worked on it at his cottage, which is open to literary tourists.

Photographers have drawn attention to the Berkyn Manor by distributing their shots of the dilapidated interior, which has been sitting empty since it’s last owner died in 1987.

Authors, Writing

A Museum of Writers Seeks to Entomb Literary Artiness

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For years, American writers have toiled in obscurity, with precious few monuments, commemorative plaques, or wax likenesses devoted to their memory. Well, friend, no more: Chicago is soon to open the first-ever American Writers Museum, where, god willing, the fraught history of our art-form, like so many before it, will be boiled down into propaganda and shoveled merrily down the throats of our youth. And if you’re worried that a museum about words will look too much like a library—perish the thought—allow me to allay your fears: “The museum will focus on using new media and technology in exhibitions, not only to differentiate it from a library, but also to engage in contemporary forms of writing from social media to digital journalism.” That is, not much writing will be featured at the American Writers Museum.

Maybe readers will finally get a good answer to the question of how a writer came up with an idea. Dan Piepenbring has this and many more tidbits on his Paris Review blog today.

Authors, Non-fiction

Distinguishing Between Real and Fancied Injury

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In Anthony Daniels’ review of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, he says:

Baldwin writes, with commendable honesty:

In a society that is entirely hostile, and, by its nature, seems determined to cut you down . . . it begins to be almost impossible to distinguish real from fancied injury. One can very quickly cease to attempt this distinction, and, what is worse, one usually ceases to attempt it without realizing that one has done so.

The distinction between real and fancied injury is a crucial one, of course, for fighting chimeras is not merely a waste of time and effort but positively destructive of all that is valuable in life. Just as paranoia eliminates that important distinction, so the incentives to emotional entrepreneurialism blur the distinction between real and simulated emotion, and veil the distinction from the phoney himself. Anger is not its own justification—there is no Cartesian syllogism in moral philosophy, “I’m angry, therefore I’m right”—and any honest person will admit that there is a seductive pleasure in anger. I have mistrusted my own rage ever since, as a student of physiology, I saw a cat stimulated to insensate rage by the discharge of electrodes in its amygdala.

Authors, Blogs, Socials

You’ll eat it and you’ll like it!

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Author Cedar Sanderson approached me a while back about contributing to a series of posts on her blog. The theme is “Eat This While You Read That.” The idea was that I would recommend a recent book of mine, along with a meal to eat with it. Then she would prepare the meal, photograph it, sample it, and report.

So (somewhat shamefacedly) I recommended Death’s Doors and the most memorable meal in my recent memory, an unusually good hot beef sandwich (also known as a commercial, or a Manhattan, apparently).

It all came out better than I deserve. You can read it here.