October 14, 2013 Quote Unquote On Twaddle By Sadie Stein “I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was, too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.” ―Katherine Mansfield
October 11, 2013 Quote Unquote Happy Birthday, Elmore By Sadie Stein “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” ―Elmore Leonard
October 10, 2013 Quote Unquote Lorrie Moore on Alice Munro By Sadie Stein “Well, I have no relationship to her. I’ve never met her. And as for her work, I came to it too late probably for it even to have been an influence, which fills me with despair. I am merely a big fan. She is a great artist, alive and among us, and still writing as well as she did at the start—if not better, which is really saying something, since if you look again at Lives of Girls and Women, her first book, you will see it is a masterpiece, not like any other first book I can think of offhand. (You will also find in it many of the elements of Love of a Good Woman and other later fiction—the obsession with drowning, the allure and menace of men, the erotic moment as narrative pivot and the glimpses of wickedness that only the young are able to act upon to save themselves; the middle-aged must attempt to endure, make do, compromised and complicitous, with what they know.) Her later fiction is quite bold structurally—its handling of time is fearless and satisfying and not to be imitated. She seems over and over again to be writing a kind of ghost story. She is also witty and cruel (that is, unblinking) and painterly. Although she writes of the provinces, she is the least provincial writer I can think of. I’m not sure that this is always understood about her.” —Lorrie Moore, the Art of Fiction No. 167
October 10, 2013 Quote Unquote Away from Her By Sadie Stein “Often, in about three quarters of what I do, I reach a point somewhere, fairly early on, when I think I’m going to abandon this story. I get myself through a day or two of bad depression, grouching around. And I think of something else I can write. It’s sort of like a love affair: you’re getting out of all the disappointment and misery by going out with some new man you don’t really like at all, but you haven’t noticed that yet. Then, I will suddenly come up with something about the story that I abandoned; I will see how to do it.” —Alice Munro, the Art of Fiction No. 137
October 3, 2013 Quote Unquote Ghostwriting Tom Clancy By Sadie Stein “I had to be more disciplined than ever about my work schedule; after the first book was turned in, I would have approximately ten months to plot, research, and write each novel. The deadline left no wiggle room—my publisher had pre-sold the books to retailers as holiday releases. Nor was there room for error when it came to the factual details of technology, ballistics, and geography. When I wrote Bio-Strike, for instance, I consulted with polymer engineers and geneticists to design a newfangled biological weapon that that would be scientifically feasible. And then there was the more routine stuff of which action thrillers are made. How does a human body react when hit with a bullet of a particular caliber, at a given distance, striking at a particular angle? I had to find out—call a cop, a forensic pathologist, or a trauma room doctor. Winging it wasn’t an option.” Read more from Jerome Preisler, who cowrote eight novels with Tom Clancy, here.
October 3, 2013 Quote Unquote Easy Reading By Sadie Stein Gore Vidal at age twenty-three, in 1948. Photo by Carl Van Vechten/Wikimedia Commons. “I can’t remember when I was not writing. I was taught to read by my grandmother. Central to her method was a tale of unnatural love called ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo.’ Then, because my grandfather, Senator Gore, was blind, I was required early on to read grown-up books to him, mostly constitutional law and, of course, the Congressional Record. The later continence of my style is a miracle, considering those years of piping the additional remarks of Mr. Borah of Idaho.” —Gore Vidal, the Art of Fiction No. 50