Authors – davidbruceblog #2

David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

• After Chilean author Isabel Allende’s first book, The House of the Spirits, was published, her agent, Carmen Balcells, threw a party for her in Madrid, Spain. Many Spanish literary celebrities attended the party, and she was bashful. How to solve the problem? Actually, she didn’t solve it—she avoided it. She admitted, “I was so frightened I spent a good part of the evening hiding in the bathroom.” As you would expect, she began reading at a very young age. When she finished reading Tolstoy’s massive War and Peace, her uncle gave her a doll. Her family encouraged her to be creative. For example, her mother allowed her to paint murals on her bedroom walls. (Later, when she was able to drive, she painted flowers on her car. For a while, she had a job translating into Spanish romance novels that had been written in English. However, because she was a feminist, she changed the heroine’s dialogue from insipid to intelligent, and she changed the endings so that the heroine became independent and did not need a hero. She got fired. In her own life, she found romance. San Francisco lawyer William Gordon spoke fluent Spanish and met her and asked her to go on a date. After they had had one date, he drove her to the airport, and she asked him if he loved her. She says, “Poor guy, he almost drove off the road. He had to pull over, and he said, ‘What are you talking about? We just met.’” She responded by writing a contract and sending it to him. The contract said that they could have a relationship on two conditions: 1) He could date no one but her, and 2) She could redecorate his house. He agreed. By the way, on 17 July 1988, they married.

• Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, began reading and writing early in life. At age seven, she began writing rhyming couplets, causing her mother to tell her that she would be “as great as Paul Laurence Dunbar,” the great African-American poet. To make sure that Gwendolyn had lots of time to read and write, her mother gave her only one chore each day: washing the dishes after the evening meal. A fire once broke out down the street, and Gwendolyn’s mother told her about it, thinking that she would like to see it, but Gwendolyn preferred to keep on reading. When she won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Annie Allen, lots of people didn’t believe it. She said, “Nobody believed it. Not even my little boy believed it. … And I guess I didn’t believe it either—at first.” When she learned that she had won the Pulitzer Prize, the electricity was off in her apartment because she and her husband were having a rough time financially, but her husband was trying hard to get it turned back on. When a photographer from the Chicago Tribunearrived, he plugged in his lighting equipment, making her nervous. Fortunately, her husband had managed to get the electricity turned on and the photographer’s lights worked. One person who encouraged her when she was young was author Langston Hughes. Her mother pushed past an usher at a church to get to him and told him, “My daughter writes.” Mr. Hughes read several of her poems and told her, “You’re talented. Keep writing. Some day you’ll have a book published.” Sixty years afterward, Gwendolyn said, “That did mean a lot to a 16-year-old girl.”

• In January 2012, a storm hit the home of 75-year-old author Peg Kehret: a log house near Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. On 21 January 2012, her driveway was covered with branches and fallen trees, and ice made it impossible for her to even walk on the driveway. Fortunately, two young men of about 21 or 22 stopped at her home. They knew who she was because everyone in the small town where she lives knows who she is and where she lives. They had even read in school her autobiography Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio. (She was paralyzed for several months, but she recovered. However, she still feels some effects of polio in her old age.) Ms. Kehret writes that they drove past her driveway and saw the branches and fallen trees, and said, “Miss Peg has polio problems. She can’t deal with those trees.” So they cleared her driveway for her. One tree was very heavy, so they asked a neighbor with a chain saw to cut it into pieces, and they moved it. Ms. Kehret wrote in her blog, “When they had finished, I could get my car out. They asked if I needed anything from town, and then they both wrote down their names and cell phone numbers and told me to call them if I needed any more help.I’ve always known from my mail that I have the best readers in the world, but I never expected that the memory of a book they read a decade ago would prompt two young men to be so caring.”

• In 1957, Gypsy Rose Lee, a stripper in burlesque, wrote a sensational autobiography titled Gypsy, which many people of wit and intelligence have admired. A woman of wit and intelligence herself, Ms. Lee once told the police after a police raid, “I wasn’t naked. I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.” Very likely, she wasn’t naked. She often wore a flesh-colored bodysuit underneath the clothing she took off. Critic Carl Rollyson once wrote, “With wit and sass, Gypsy Rose Lee transformed herself from a burlesque dancer into a nationwide celebrity. She also wrote her own life story, a masterpiece her biographers still struggle to match.”

• Caitlin Moran, British author of How to Be a Woman, loves Twitter. She also finds it useful in solving emergencies. For example, in 2011 someone stole her brother’s wallet while he was at Victoria station. Ms. Moran said, “I just went on Twitter and asked if there was anyone nearby who could go and give him a fiver so he could get the tube [subway] to my house. And within 12 minutes, someone had.”

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David Bruce’s Smashwords Bookstore: Retellings of Classic Literature, Anecdote Collections, Discussion Guides for Teachers of Literature, Collections of Good Deed Accounts, etc. Some eBooks are free.

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THE TROJAN WAR

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SHAKESPEARE: 38 PLAYS

***

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S COMPLETE PLAYS: RETELLINGS

***

SOMETIMES FREE EBOOK

John Ford’s The Broken Heart: A Retelling, by David Bruce

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/792090

David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

• Johnny Brewton is the creator behind the zine X-Ray, which consists of 226 copies, each one at least slightly different. It was definitely an artistic project, and lifetime subscribers included the J. Paul Getty Museum, the rare book department of S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo, and the University of Wisconsin. One contributor was Hunter S. Thompson, who helped create the cover of X-Ray#4 by putting on lipstick and kissing a few copies and by shooting a bullet through every copy. (The cover was a photograph of Marilyn Chambers holding a box of Ivory Snow.) Another contributor to X-Raywas Charles Bukowski, who impressed Mr. Brewton with his work ethic: Mr. Brewton wrote Mr. Bukowski on a Monday requesting some poems, and by that Saturday—not even a week later—he received an envelope containing some poems. Mr. Brewton says about Mr. Bukowski, “I was amazed at how generous he was—he really gave backa lot and supported small presses; he taught me a lot about professionalism and deadlines. He was always on time.” Yet another contributor was Timothy Leary. Mr. Leary’s publicist, however, in a phone conversation told Mr. Brewton, “Mr. Leary has to charge one dollar per word for articles and stories. Are you sure you want to do this?” Because the zine made basically zero money, Mr. Brewton sarcastically replied, “That fits my budget perfectly! I’ll buy one word.” The publicist asked, “Which word do you want?” Mr. Brewton replied, “I don’t know. Have Mr. Leary decide.” The publicist spoke to Mr. Leary, and Mr. Brewton overheard Mr. Leary say, “That’s great! Yes! I pick the word ‘Chaos’—that’s my piece!” Mr. Brewton titled the work “A One Word Dosage from Dr. Timothy Leary” and put a card saying “Chaos” inside a pill envelope—each of the 226 copies of the issue contained the one-word contribution.

• Students at MIT have occasionally hacked (that is, pranked) the school’s works of art. Actually, one hack really wasn’t a hack — it really was a work of art. Artist Scott Raphael Schiamberg installed what appeared to be a field of wheat in Lobby 7. On a Monday in May 1996, students and faculty strolled through the wheat. Mr. Schiamberg received much media publicity, and he received many congratulatory emails. One MIT employee emailed him, “It took my breath away. All Mondays should be so beautiful.” Of course, MIT students added a few touches of their own to the work of art — such as a cow and a scarecrow. However, MIT students liked the field of wheat, and they did not like some of the other works of art on the MIT campus, such as Louise Nevelson’s Transparent Horizons, which MIT students criticize as being like much other MIT art: In the students’ word, the art is “ugly.” MIT hackers once installed a desk and a study light in the top of the sculpture, and they once rededicated it with this plaque: “Louise Nevelson / b. 1990 / Big Black Scrap Heap / 1975.” And occasionally MIT hackers will install authentic-looking but satiric “works of art” in MIT galleries. For example, in 1985 MIT hacking group James E. Tetazoo installed “NO KNIFE: A STUDY IN MIXED MEDIASEARTH TONES, NUMBER THREE” in MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. The “work of art” consisted of a large plate, small plate, fork, two spoons (one a soup spoon), and glass on a tray placed on an upside-down trash receptacle. A statement accompanying the “art” satirized art criticism. The first sentence read, “The artist’s mode d’emploi relies upon minimalist kinematic methods; space and time are frozen in a staid reality of restrained sexuality.”

• The Society of Design in Pennsylvania (the home state of letterer, illustrator, and designerJessica Hische, who lives in San Francisco, California) wanted herto visit them, so they created a unique invitation for her with 27 registered Pennsylvania vehicle license plates. They were vanity license plates, so each plate bore carefully chosen letters. Put together, the 27 license plates (each license plate is separated from another with a slash) spelled out the invitation: “DEAR JES / SICA PLE / ASE CONS / IDER VIS / ITING SO / CIETY OF / DESIGN I / N PENNSY /LVANIA A / ND SHAR / NG CAPTI / VATING A / ND AMAZI / TYPOG /RAPHIC W / ORK THAT / WILL AMA / ZE ASTON / ISH MOTI / VATE AND / PROVE TO / BE BENEF / ICIAL TO / AN ENORM / OUSLY LA / RGE CROW / D THANKS” — of course, she said YES to the invitation. Actually, she wrote in her blog, “Of course my answer is a resounding ‘YES! I will ~~marry~~come to visit you!’ In fact, not only will I come visit you, but I’m bringing each of you a present. Each of the 35 people listed on the site will receive an original drawing as my sincerest and most heart-felt appreciation for making me feel like the luckiest girl in the world. Already got started on two of them! There are days when I wish I could hug the universe. Today is one of those days.”

• As a beginning cartoonist, Ted Rall wanted people to see his art. After meeting graffiti artist Keith Haring, he thought, “Hehas the approach.” What is the approach? Instead of working to please editors, who are pleased by generic work, simply get your art in front of the people. Therefore, Ted took his cartoons, went to the bank he hated working at, and ran off 700 copies very early in the morning on the bank’s Xerox machine. Then he and his girlfriend walked through Broadway, Harlem, and Times Square and pasted the cartoons wherever they could. The walk and pasting took four hours and covered seven miles. He put his PO address on the cartoons and got fan mail—and he got letters from editors who wrote, “I was visiting New York. I saw your cartoon on the wall and ripped it down. I was wondering if you’d mind if we ran your cartoons.” Ted quit the bank job he hated and became a professional cartoonist.

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THE TROJAN WAR

***

SHAKESPEARE: 38 PLAYS

***

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S COMPLETE PLAYS: RETELLINGS

***

SOMETIMES FREE EBOOK

John Ford’s The Broken Heart: A Retelling, by David Bruce

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/792090

David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

• Sometimes, it was hard to get an interview with Canadian novelist Ernest Buckler, author of The Mountain and the Valley. The shy writer once hid in the cornfields of his farm rather than be interviewed. He did find living in a rural area conducive to being a writer, although the country did have its own kind of distractions. He needed silence to write, and he once said that sometimes when he was ready to write “this is precisely the time when somebody will come in, some gal, you know, who’ll talk for hours on end as to whether as to whether her husband prefers turnips in the stew or cauliflower.” Although Mr. Buckler was shy, he was a good interview. He once said, “Writers, by and large, are the dreariest people you can possibly know, because they are just stuffed with words, like dry-bread dressing on a Christmas Eve goose’s ass.” As a famous author, he sometimes received funny letters. Someone from Cape Breton wrote him, “I enjoyed your book very much. It was such clear print.” A woman from Seattle, Washington, sent him her measurements and wrote him that his name — Ernest Redmond Buckler — thrilled her and that she could see him on a white charger rescuing damsels in distress. Mr. Buckler said, “My God, myself on a white charger! I’m scared sh*tless of horses. One kicked me in the head at thirteen.”

• Isaac Asimov wrote hundreds of books. Asked what is his favorite book, he used to reply, “The last one I’ve written.” Of course, he was known for writing science fiction, but he also wrote many books about science for the general public. He once said, “I can read a dozen dull books and make one interesting book out of them.” Other people wondered how he could write so much. (He did it by writing for hours every day.) Mr. Asimov did not get a word processor until June of 1981, preferring to write on typewriters. While interviewing Mr. Asimov in 1982, Frank Kendig joked, “I think most of us thought that you had one [a word processor] all along—that or a team of writers chained in the basement.” Many people have rituals such as sharpening pencils that they perform before they begin to write. Mr. Asimov once said, “The only thing I do before I start writing is to make sure that I’m close enough to the typewriter to reach the keys.” An interviewer once asked Mr. Asimov what he would do if he were told that he had only six months to live. He replied, “Type faster!”

• Margaret Wise Brown, the author of the children’s story “Goodnight Moon,” was an eccentric. When she received her very first royalty check, she bought every flower for sale on a flower cart. She owned land and a house in Maine that she referred to as “The Only House.” Among other features, she had an outdoor room including a mirror nailed to a tree, a table, and a nightstand. She once decorated her room in a hotel in Paris with orange trees and live birds. Many of her friends were also eccentrics. They formed a group they called the Bird Brain Society. One of the rules was that a member could declare any day Christmas and invite the other members of the group to come over and celebrate. She died early, at age 42. Following an operation for appendicitis in France, she seemed to be recovering well. To show her nurse how well she was doing, she kicked her leg as if she were doing the can-can and died instantly of an embolism.

• The late Ray Bradburywas generous when it came to advising and helping other writers. When New York Timesbestselling author Jonathan Maberry was a young teenager, he met and got to know Mr. Bradbury. Mr. Maberry says about Mr. Bradbury, “He gave me a lot of very good advice on craft and the business of publishing, but one of the things that stuck out in my mind was this — he said, ‘Writers should always help other writers — because you can bet every penny in your pocket that no one else will do it.’ Mr. Maberry says that his manifesto now is this: “Writers should always help other writers.” Mr. Maberry says that he “believes that if writers help other writers, then more good works will get published, more people will want to read these works, and all of publishing will thrive. Indie, mainstream, and solo press.”

• Stephen King has been typecast as a horror writer although he does many kinds of writing, such as the stories in Different Seasons, including “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.” In fact, many readers refuse to believe that Mr. King writes anything other than horror. Mr. King illustrates this with an anecdote: “I was down here [one of the Sarasota Keys in Florida] in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner—obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, ‘I know who you are; you are the horror writer. I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.’And I said, ‘I wrote that.’ And she said, ‘No, you didn’t.’ And she walked off and went on her way.”

• Isaac Asimov wrote his autobiography for Doubleday, but after writing 50 pages, he discovered that he had gotten only as far as his first three years of life, meaning that his autobiography would be huge. His friend and fellow science-fiction writer Ben Bova visited him and saw the many pages of typed manuscript that Mr. Asimov was pouring out. Mr. Asimov explained, “In this autobiography, I’m including every stupid thing I can remember having said or done.” Mr. Bova joked, “No wonder it’s so long.”

• In 1939, an alumnus of MIT, class of 1889, wrote a 50,110-word novelty novel titled Gadsby. Why “novelty”? It did not contain the letter E. It did include sentences such as this: “Youth cannot stay for long in a condition of inactivity.”

• “The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.” — Benjamin Disraeli

***

THE TROJAN WAR

***

SHAKESPEARE: 38 PLAYS

***

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S COMPLETE PLAYS: RETELLINGS

***

SOMETIMES FREE EBOOK

John Ford’s The Broken Heart: A Retelling, by David Bruce

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/792090

***

SOMETIMES FREE EBOOK

William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure:A Retelling in Prose, by David Bruce

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/530136

***

SOMETIMES FREE EBOOK

Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist:A Retelling in Prose

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/731768

David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

• Even science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, author of The Dreaming Jewels and More Than Human, suffered from writer’s block. In 1962, he gave a Guest of Honor speech at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, Illinois, and spoke about how fellow science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein had helped him when Mr. Sturgeon, desperate, wrote him a letter about his writer’s block: “I told him my troubles; that I couldn’t write—perhaps it was that I had no ideas in my head that would strike a story. By return airmail—I don’t know how he did it—I got back 26 story ideas. Some of them ran for a page and a half; one or two of them were a line or two. I mean, there were story ideas that some writers would give their left ear for. Some of them were merely suggestions; just little hints, things that will spark a writer like, ‘Ghost of a little cat patting around eternity looking for a familiar lap to sit in.’” Mr. Heinlein did more than that. Mr. Sturgeon added, “I had told him my writing troubles, but I hadn’t told him of any other troubles; however, clipped to the stack of story ideas was a check for a hundred dollars with a little scribbled note, ‘I have a suspicion your credit is bent.’” By the way, Mr. Heinlein’s ideas resulted in two stories by Mr. Sturgeon: “And Now the News” and “The Other Man.”

• Late in her life, Anaïs Nin spoke at Western Michigan University and answered questions from the audience, which was mostly composed of students. A young woman who asked her the first question asked a very personal question: What were the worst problems she faced in her marriage? Ms. Nin simply said, “I will pass a hat around the room and ask every married person to drop a note in it about the worst marital problem he or she has had to deal with. Then I will hold the hat up and say, ‘Yes, all of these.’” (She did pass the hat, but only so people could write down questions for her.) Author Stephanie Gauper was impressed by the way that Ms. Nin answered the young woman’s very personal question. Ms. Gauper wrote that “the way she turned the first question into a lesson on decorum and universality moved me and the whole audience, too. The young woman was not humiliated; she indeed appeared to feel honored by the kindly attention from this still gorgeous and brilliant older woman. I have seen speakers who would nail such a questioner to the wall. Nin was so gentle and teaching, so generous.”

• Isak Dinesen, the Danish author of Out of Africa,managed a coffee farm in Kenya, where soon after arriving, she tended to a young Kikuyu boy named Kamante who had a very badly infected leg. After she cured his infection, she began to be greatly in demand as a doctor. She also did the good deed of burying a girl named Wamboi who had died after falling off an oxcart and being run over by its wheels, despite being forbidden to ride on oxcarts. Her corpse lay unburied for three days because police could not decide who was at fault for her death and because the members of her tribe did not want to touch a corpse. By the way, Isak acquired the nicknames of “Lioness” and “Lioness von Blixen” (due to her marriage, she was the Baroness von Blixen) because after a lion had killed some of her cattle, she and her friend Denys Fitch Hatton hunted it. They left a carcass where the lion would find it at night, and when they heard the lion, Isak flicked on the light of a lantern and Denys shot the lion.

• In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women. She did many good deeds in her life in addition to advocating for the rights of women. Her father was a drunk who physically abused his wife. Mary would sometimes put her own body in between her father and her mother in order to protect her mother. When Eliza, one of Mary’s sisters, married an abusive man, Mary and a friend named Fanny Blood helped Eliza escape from him by taking a carriage to London when he was away from his home. During the journey, Eliza nervously bit and broke her wedding band into pieces. They then took a number of other carriages in an erratic pattern to foil pursuit. Later, while Mary was taking a ship from Lisbon, Portugal, to London, England, a storm arose and crippled another ship. The captain of Mary’s ship at first would not allow the sailors of the crippled ship to get on board, saying that there was not enough room, but Mary threatened to report the captain, and he allowed the sailors to get on board. She also sent money to family members.

• On 14 September 1882, an elderly man intent on committing suicide jumped from a steamboat into the Thames River. On the same steamboat was Bram Stoker, who in 1897 would publish his novel Dracula. Mr. Stoker jumped in the river after the man. He held the man’s head above water until help arrived. He then carried the man to his home in the Chelsea district, where his physician brother, George Stoker, tried but failed to resuscitate him. Although the elderly man died, the Royal Humane Society awarded Bram Stoker a Bronze Medal for his effort to save the man’s life. Playwright Arthur Pinero wrote Mr. Stoker in a letter, “How proud I am to count myself amongst those who have the privilege of your acquaintance.” In his own old age and in poor health, Mr. Stoker needed financial help. Providing it were friends such as then-popular novelist Hall Caine.

• Good deeds tend to be practical and pragmatic rather than elegant. In 1977, poet Deena Metzger fell on an icy street in New York City. A black man saw her and ordered two young boys who happened to be walking nearby, “Pick that woman up!”

• “Three Rules for Literary Success: 1. Read a lot. 2. Write a lot. 3. Read a lot more, write a lot more.”— Robert Silverberg

***

THE TROJAN WAR

***

SHAKESPEARE: 38 PLAYS

***

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S COMPLETE PLAYS: RETELLINGS

***

SOMETIMES FREE EBOOK

John Ford’s The Broken Heart: A Retelling, by David Bruce

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/792090

***

SOMETIMES FREE EBOOK

William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure:A Retelling in Prose, by David Bruce

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/530136

***

SOMETIMES FREE EBOOK

Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist:A Retelling in Prose

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/731768

David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

• Charles Bukowski worked at lousy jobs for much of his life, but he wanted to be a writer. In 1969, John Martin, publisher of Black Sparrow Press, made him an offer: For each and every month of the rest of Mr. Bukowski’s life, Mr. Martin would pay him $100. Mr. Martin atttached a condition: Mr. Bukowski had to quit his job at the post office. Instead of working at lousy jobs, he would have to write. Mr. Bukowski, age 49, gladly accepted the offer and quit his job and wrote. In 1971, Black Sparrow Presspublished Mr. Bukowski’sfirst novel: Post Office. After 15 years of receiving $100 each and every month, Mr. Bukowski wrote Mr. Martin a letter in which he expressed his appreciation at not having to work at lousy jobs. In part, he wrote, “I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: ‘I’ll never be free!’ One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life. So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die. To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.”

• Maurice Sendak, who died on 8 May 2012, wrote and illustrated many books for children. Of course, he received letters from his readers. He liked the ones that were actually voluntarily written by the kids — adults assigned too many of the letters he received. He gave an example: “Dear Mr. Sendak, Mrs. Markowitz said would you please send a free book and two drawings?” But the ones from children who actually felt the urge to write him were wonderful and wonderfully honest — Mr. Sendak appreciated honesty. After he wrote Outside Over There, a little girl from Canada read it and wrote him, “I like all of your books, why did you write this book, this is the first book I hate. I hate the babies in this book, why are they naked, I hope you die soon. Cordially…” Her mother wrote this note that accompanied the letter: “I wondered if I should even mail this to you — I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”Mr. Sendak’s feelings were not hurt. He said, “I was so elated. It was so natural and spontaneous. The mother said, ‘You should know I am pregnant and she has been fiercely opposed to it.’ Well, she [the little girl] didn’t want competition, and the whole book was about a girl who’s fighting against having to look after her baby sister.” Mr. Sendak added, “If [the letter is] true, then you can’t care about the vicious and the painful. You can only be astonished. Most kids don’t dare tell the truth. Kids are the politest people in the world. A letter [that says, ‘I hope you die soon’] is wonderful. ‘I wish you would die.’ I should have written back, ‘Honey, I will.’”

• Jo Nesbø is the Norwegian author of Scanda-noir crime thrillers starring the character Harry Hole, about whose last name he said, “The Norwegian pronunciation is Hoola, but it’s fine if you call him Hole.” When Mr. Nesbøwas younger, he played in a rock band with a younger brother. Mr. Nesbø said, “When we started the band, we really weren’t that good and we would change our name every week so that audiences wouldn’t realize it was us playing again. So the band never really had a name. Eventually we got a bit better and fans would ask when di derre[Norwegian for ‘those guys’] were coming back. So we called ourselves Di Derre.” By the way, Mr. Nesbø is a soccer [European football] fan. When he was 10 years old, he thought about becoming a fan of the Arsenal football club, but an older brother forced him to become a fan of Tottenham. Mr. Nesbø explained, “I had been thinking about supporting Arsenal because I quite liked the shirts. But then my 15-year-old brother told me firmly that I wasn’t and that I had two days to learn the entire Tottenham squad. He wasn’t someone that you disobeyed.” Harry Hole is a fan of Tottenham Hotspur football club, and in one of Mr.Nesbø’s Harry Hole thrillers, the bad guys are drug dealers who wear Arsenal replica shirts. Mr. Nesbø said, “I’ve got a number of friends who support Arsenal, and they gave me a lot of grief about that. They said, ‘Only a coward uses his power as a writer to do something like that.’ […] I told them to sod off.”

• One of the stories told about Kurt Vonnegut is how he quit his job writing for Sports Illustrated. He was assigned to write a story about a horse that jumped over a fence during a race and tried to run away. Supposedly, Mr. Vonnegut stared for hours at a blank sheet of paper, and then he wrote “The horse jumped over the f**king fence” and quit. Later, as a famous author, he made a cameo in the movie Back to School. He played himself, and the character played by Rodney Dangerfield hired him to write a term paper on the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. After Mr. Dangerfield handed in the paper and the professor read it, the professor recognized that the paper was plagiarized and added, “Whoever did write this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut.”

***

THE TROJAN WAR

***

SHAKESPEARE: 38 PLAYS

***

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S COMPLETE PLAYS: RETELLINGS

***

SOMETIMES FREE EBOOK

John Ford’s The Broken Heart: A Retelling, by David Bruce

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/792090

David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

• Comedian Red Skelton sometimes did not give enough credit to his writers, although he did pay them well. On The Tonight Show, host Jack Parr asked him where he got his jokes. Red replied, “All my jokes are put in my head by the voice of God.” His writers asked Red why he had not given them credit. Red replied, “You’re just sore because I gave God top billing.” The writers figured that if God was going to get top billing, He had better work for it, so they gave Red the script for his next show: fifty blank pages. They also gave him this note: “Dear Red: Please have God fill in the empty pages. Thanks. Your Writers.” By the way, maybe God did deserve some credit for putting jokes into Red’s head. Red once fell very ill and needed an operation. He was wheeled into the operating room, and the surgeons found this note written on a piece of tape on his chest: “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL CHRISTMAS.” By the way, when Red’s movie Half a Hero turned to be very bad, Red complained, “They were afraid to show it at Grauman’s Chinese Theater for fear the footprints would get up and walk away.”

• Artist James Montgomery Flagg painted Mark Twain’s portrait although at first Mr. Twain said that he would “rather have smallpox than sit for his picture.” Of course, Mr. Twain told funny stories during his sittings and at times Mr. Flagg could not paint because he was laughing so hard. Mr. Flagg remembers that once Mr. Twain cussed softly and then said, “My wife cusses, too—not the same words.Shesays ‘Sugar!’ and the Recording Angel will give her just as black marks as he does me!” One of Mr. Twain’s eccentricities was to spread his mail in a long line on the floor. He would walk down the line and choose the letters that he wanted to read. In his old age, Mr. Twain always wore white suits. He told Mr. Flagg, “I don’t like to be conspicuous, but I do like to be the most noticeable person!” Mr. Twain and his friend William Dean Howells once attended a performance by singer Adelina Patti. Mr. Howells asked him what he thought of Ms. Patti, and Mr. Twain replied, “I would rather sleep with that woman stark naked than with General Grant in full uniform.”

• Kathryn Stockett wrote the novel The Help, which was a major success both as a book and as a movie. The book was rejected — and rewritten — many times before an agent read it and agreed to try to sell it to a publisher. Ms. Stockett remembers meeting published authors who advised her, “Just keep at it. I received fourteen rejections before I finally got an agent. Fourteen!How many have you gotten?” Unfortunately, the answer was 55 — and counting. She did not give up. Even while pregnant in the hospital, she was working on doing research to incorporate in her book to make it better. A nurse told her, “Put the book down, you nut job — you’re crowning!” Finally, after 60 rejections and five years of writing and rewriting, she got an agent: Susan Ramer. Three weeks later, Ms. Ramer sold The Help.

• At times, Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of the classic The Scarlet Letter, was short of money. During one such time, his lawyer friend George Hilliard collected money from several friends and fans of Mr. Hawthorne. When Mr. Hilliard gave him the money, he said it was a payment on “the debt we owe you for what you have done for American Literature.” Later, Mr. Hawthorne got a job as a diplomat in Liverpool, England, and was much more flush with money. He was charitable. As a diplomat, he ran into many Americans and helped them with loans that were usually not repaid. When several American sailors were shipwrecked in the Atlantic Ocean, he used his own money to help them.

• Neil Gaiman, who wrote Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witchwith Terry Pratchett, says about his co-author, “Terry is that rarity, the kind of author who likes Writing, not Having Written, or Being an Author, but the actual sitting there and making things up in front of a screen.” Mr. Pratchett was working as a press officer while he wrote his first novel, and each night he wrote 400 words. He needed to write 300 words to finish his first novel, and after he had written the 300 words, he put another sheet of paper in his typewriter (in the days before screens) and wrote 100 words of his second novel.

• Early in her adult life, Ruth Rendell, who also writes using the pen name Barbara Vine, had a job as a reporter for the Chigwell Times. She was fired after she wrote an article about a local tennis club’s dinner without actually attending the dinner—and therefore did not know that the speaker had died while giving his speech.As an author, she writes often about death and murderers, but says, “I’ve never met a murderer as far as I know. I would hate to. It’s just not necessary.” By the way, she married Don Rendell, her former boss at the Chigwell Times.

• Hugh Troy was a noted practical joker. He once held a party for his friend Stephen Potter, author of Gamesmanship. He invited many guests, and each of them brought a Potter book for Mr. Potter to sign, but all of the books were by other authors who had Potter for their last name. At another of his parties in which an author was the guest of honor, Mr. Troy’s guests all brought a copy of the author’s book to sign, but when the guests left the party, they left behind piles of the autographed books.

• Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote: Part 1and Don Quixote: Part 2, with 10 years passing in between the books. In fact, he might not have ever written Don Quixote: Part 2if another writer had not made him angry by writing his own Don Quixote: Part 2first.

• “I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.” — Steven Wright.

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THE TROJAN WAR

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David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

• William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, won the Noble Prize for Literature for the year 1983. The day after he had learned that he had won, he drove his car into a country town and parked his car illegally so he could run into a shop for a couple of minutes. When he left the shop, he discovered that a meter maid had given him a parking ticket. The meter maid pointed to a sign about parking and asked him, “Can’t you read?” He then drove around the corner and saw two policemen, whom he asked if he could go to Town Hall and pay his parking fine immediately. One policeman replied, “No, sir, I’m afraid you can’t do that.” Mr. Golding felt as if the policeman thought of him as one of “those people who are clearly harmless if a bit silly.” The policeman showed him a place on the parking ticket that was marked “name and address of sender” and told him, “You should write your name and address in that place. You make out a cheque for ten pounds, making it payable to the Clerk to the Justices at this address written here. Then you write the same address on the outside of the envelope, stick a sixteen-penny stamp in the top right-hand corner of the envelope, then post it. And may we congratulate you on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.”

• Ray Bradbury remembers being presented with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters as “a fantastic evening”; however, he did run into a problem. Late in the evening, heading back to his room, he suddenly felt an urgent need to pee. He said, “For God’s sake, where’s the men’s room?” None was handy, but fortunately a woman said, “There’s a potted palm over there. Why don’t you go use it?” Mr. Bradbury says, “Nobody saw me. At least I don’t think so.” One of Mr. Bradbury’s most famous works is Fahrenheit 451, which is about a fireman who does not put out fires, but instead starts them in order to burn books. Mr. Bradbury, of course, loves books. He says, “I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library.” He also used to steal magazines from a store, wash his hands, read the magazines, and then sneak them back into the store and put them back where they belonged. By the way, Mr. Bradbury’s lifelong credo is this: “Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”

• As a young man, William Faulkner became friends with Sherwood Anderson. Before noon, Mr. Faulkner would never see Mr. Anderson, but in the afternoon they would walk together around New Orleans and talk to people, and in the evening they would share a bottle or two of an alcoholic beverage and Mr. Faulkner would listen as Mr. Anderson talked. Mr. Faulkner decided that if this was the life of a writer, then the life of a writer was the life for him. He began writing his first novel, and he discovered that he liked writing. After about three weeks of Mr. Faulkner not seeing Mr. Anderson, Mr. Anderson showed up at Mr. Faulkner’s home and asked him, “Are you mad at me?” Mr. Faulkner replied that he was writing his first novel. Mr. Anderson said, “My God!” Then he left. Soon Mr. Faulkner finished his first novel, and Mr. Anderson’s wife told him, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn’t have to read your manuscript, he will tell his publisher to accept it.”Mr. Faulkner says, “I said, ‘Done,’ and that’s how I became a writer.”

• Dorothy Parker was fired from her job as a drama critic at Vanity Fairbecause she panned the plays of three very powerful men: Dillingham, Ziegfeld, and Belasco. In solidarity with her, Robert Sherwood and Robert Benchley quit. Ms. Parker said, “It was the greatest act of friendship I’d known.” They all went to work for Life, where she and Mr. Benchley shared an office of which she famously observed, “He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery.” As you would expect, Ms. Parker was a good interviewee. Marion Capron of The Paris Reviewasked her, “What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?” Ms. Parker replied, “Need of money, dear.” By the way, Ms. Parker at first wrote in longhand, although she later used a typewriter: “I wrote in longhand at first, but I’ve lost it. I use two fingers on the typewriter. […] I know so little about the typewriter that once I bought a new one because I couldn’t change the ribbon on the one I had.”

• In her memoir I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, Maxine Hong Kingston writes that Joseph, her grown son, reads all of her writing and has requested of her, “Don’t write about me.” She agreed, but later in the book she wrote that once when Joseph was very young she gave him a whole bag of marshmallows so she could write uninterrupted for 20 minutes. She also writes about how she and Alice Walker were arrested while protesting war. The result was that they were both handcuffed and put in jail. Ms. Kingston was forced to ask Ms. Walker to undo her pants for her so she could pee.

• Swedish author Stieg Larsson became internationally famous with the publication of the crime series Millennium Trilogy, of which the title of the first volume was translated as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. His father bought him for his 13^thbirthday an expensive typewriter after reading a novel that Stieg had written in a notebook. In addition to being expensive, the typewriter was noisy. Sieg’s father says that “we had to make space for him in the cellar. He would write in the cellar and come up for meals, but at least we could sleep at night.”

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David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

Coville

All beginning authors have to deal with rejection slips. Young people’s author Bruce Coville calls them “ugly baby letters.” He says, “It’s like getting a letter that says, ‘Dear Mr. Coville, We have carefully examined photographs of your child, and boy, do you have an ugly baby!” Mr. Coville also says that beginning authors have to keep on writing and sending out manuscripts—if they don’t, they will never be published.

Good satire often appears where you don’t expect it, and why not—satirists are highly intelligent people who sense opportunities that ordinary people don’t recognize. For example, many odd items appear for sale at <amazon.com>, including skinned rabbit carcasses. Immediately, satirists started writing customer comments: “Nothing says ‘EAT ME’ like a picture of a skinned rabbit carcass!” and “I bought this thinking it would make a wonderful gift for my neighbor’s young son. Ordering was simple, and delivery was flawless. So you can imagine the shock and awe not only on my face, but also my neighbor’s three-year-old son, when he opened the package to find a DEAD rabbit.” The <amazon.com> page selling uranium ore provoked this comment: “My wife and I purchased this product for the express purpose of breeding an atomic superman. After a daily regimen of ingesting a tablespoon of this powder mixed with green tea along with her prenatal vitamins, my wife developed serious morning sickness and perished during childbirth.”

While author Robert Parsons was on holiday in St. Lucia, he and his family ate dinner at a buffet restaurant. Unfortunately, three English teenagers were seated nearby, and they were using the f-word. Because Mr. Parsons’ daughter was young enough to be reading books such as My Little Pony, he went over to the teenagers and told them to stop using foul language. They stopped. Unfortunately, Mr. Parsons’ wife told him later that the teenagers’ language had been foul, but his language when telling them to shut up had been fouler. Of course, telling three teenagers who could easily beat him up to shut up may be dangerous, but Mr. Parsons says that he has done something even more dangerous: taking drugs with the Clash and the Sex Pistols. By the way, Mr. Parsons is learning Japanese, a language that his wife and his daughter know well. As of early 2008, he had learned enough Japanese that his young daughter no longer laughed at him, and he says that he is able to read Tokyo street signs—“as long as they say ‘sushi.’”

David Grazian wrote a book about Philadelphia’s nightlife titled On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, partly because as a sociologist, he knew that the cities that have been most studied—New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas—are not like other American cities. Mr. Grazian was able to do research by interviewing people partly because he looks like an everyman and not competition or a wolf. He asks, “Can you think up a worse pickup line than ‘Hey, I’m a sociologist … mind if I study you?’” Mr. Grazian says that only one woman ever fell for that line “and I married her.” One thing that Mr. Grazian discovered in his research was that nightlife provokes anxiety: “Shrinking violets and 40-year-old virgins, sure, they were scared. But also the popular kids and the beautiful people—especially the popular kids and the beautiful people. I sometimes think we’d all just be better off dressing down, and stop trying so hard to be hip. Having fun should be way more fun than this.”

At age 13, Mikita Brittman, author of The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, took part in a school debate in which students portrayed famous people trapped in a hot-air balloon from which gas was leaking. One of the passengers had to be overthrown overboard in order to save the other passengers, and each of the passengers had to make the case that he or she was so important that someone else should be thrown overboard. Mikita, of course, being good with words, was able to convince the other children that her character—Bela Lugosi, star of Dracula—was so important that one of the other characters ought to be thrown overboard instead of Mr. Lugosi. Those other characters included Winston Churchill, King Henry VIII, and Margaret Thatcher.

The Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard is highly rated by critics, yet little known by readers. In addition to writing novels, she also has memorized much, much poetry. In fact, her knowledge of poetry led to her and her husband, Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, meeting the novelist Graham Greene. In a restaurant at Capri, they overheard him trying to remember a line of poetry. Ms. Hazzard knew the line and recited it, and the three became friends. Critics do appreciate her. At the end of an interview with Ms. Hazzard, journalist Bryan Appleyard told her, “Thank you. You have written some beautiful novels.” She replied, “Pardon, what did you say?” Mr. Appleyard repeated his statement, and she admitted, “I heard you. I just wanted to hear you say it again.”

Scott Adams, cartoonist and writer of Dilbert, does fewer continuing stories than other comics creators. He feels that all too often the end of the story isn’t funny and therefore is just a wasted day. In fact, he once created a continuing story in which Dogbert created giant menacing cucumbers while doing genetic research. However, he says, “I realized halfway through the series that there was no way this could end well, so I just did an editor’s note saying I realized it wasn’t funny and so I thought I’d just stop there.” His readers agreed that the giant menacing cucumber story was “going nowhere” and that Mr. Adams was right to end the story.

When young people’s author Beverly Cleary was a child, she entered a contest in which the best essay about an animal would win $2. She won the $2, and she found out that she had been the only person to write and send in an essay. Ms. Cleary says, “This incident was one of the most valuable lessons in writing I ever learned. Try! Others will talk about writing but may never get around to trying.”

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David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

Kingsolver

In 2008, author Barbara Kingsolver’s younger daughter, Lily, was 11 years old. According to Ms. Kingsolver, “The wisdom of each generation is necessarily new. This tends to dawn on us in revelatory moments, brought to us by our children.” As an example, she brings up her daughter, whom she walks to the school bus stop and talks to until the bus arrives. This is a good time, but a few weeks previously, Lily looked her over and then told her, “Mom, just so you know, the only reason I’m letting you wear that outfit is because of your age.” When the bus arrived, Ms. Kingsolver hid behind a building. That is an example of new knowledge. In Ms. Kingsolver’s words, “It’s okay […] to deck out and turn up as the village idiot” when you are old enough. What about the old knowledge? Ms. Kingsolver says, “Honestly, it is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.” According to Ms. Kingsolver, the books that are good are the books that are wise.

Frederick Forsyth has written many novels, including The Day of the Jackal. How does he write? The same way he has written for 50 years, he says: “With a typewriter.” One of those typewriters—a portable with a steel case—has seen a lot of action, and it demonstrated a great superiority over computers: “It had a crease across the lid which was done by a bullet in Biafra. [Mr. Forsyth was a foreign correspondent in the 1960s.] It just kept tapping away. It didn’t need power, it didn’t need batteries, it didn’t need recharging. One ribbon went back and forward and back until it was a rag, almost, and out came the dispatches.” Of course, typewriters have other advantages over computers, Mr. Forsyth points out: “I have never had an accident where I have pressed a button and accidentally sent seven chapters into cyberspace, never to be seen again. And have you ever tried to hack into my typewriter? It is very secure.” And, of course, typewriters have yet another advantage over computers: tangible words. Mr. Forsyth says, “I like to see black words on white paper rolling up in front of my gaze.”

Anna Sam worked for eight years as a check-out girl in a supermarket in France, then wrote the book Les tribulations d’une caissière (The Trials and Tribulations of a Check-Out Girl) about her experiences there. For example, occasionally a French mother would point to Ms. Sam and tell her child, “You see, darling, if you don’t work hard at school, you’ll become a caissière [check-out girl] like the lady.” Whenever that happened, Ms. Sam informed the mother that she had had five years of education at a university. Unable to find a good job after graduation, she had taken the job at the supermarket. She says, “There are a lot of students with literary, sociology or artistic degrees in supermarkets in France. Not many of them really want to become check-out workers.” Of course, France being France, even supermarkets are erotic locales. Ms. Sam says, “You would be surprised at the number of kisses in the aisles … at hands on bottoms in front of the frozen goods, at breasts caressed in the woman’s lingerie [section].”

Novelist Leif Enger got the writing bug from Lin, his brother, a writer of short stories whose first solo-written novel is Undiscovered Country, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but set in Minnesota. Their father read Lin’s novel, then watched Mel Gibson’s movie version of Hamlet. The father, who may be a tad biased, says, “I think Lin’s a little better than Shakespeare.” Leif has written a Western titled So Brave, Young, and Handsome, for which he did research on the Hundred and One ranch. Among other things, the managers brought in Geronimo, who was then old, and had him shoot a buffalo. Leif says, “They billed it as ‘Geronimo’s Last Buffalo.’ Nobody knew it was really his first buffalo because the Apache didn’t hunt buffalo.”

In 1934, people speculated that the great Jewish Ukrainian poet Chaim Bialik might win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Unfortunately, he failed to win. Fortunately, he was philosophical about the loss, saying, “I’m very glad that I didn’t win the prize. Now everybody’s my friend and feels sorry for me.” He went on to speculate about what would have happened if he had won the Noble Prize: “Then I’m sure some of the very same people who are now so indignant on my account would have said, ‘What’s so wonderful about getting the Nobel Prize? Why, even that poet Bialik got one!”

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, which was published by Roberts Brothers, a firm that made an offer to buy the copyright to the book but also recommended that she keep the copyright because the book was likely to be popular and she could make more money if she owned the copyright. Ms. Alcott did keep the copyright, and the book made her lots and lots of money. She later wrote in her journal: “An honest publisher and a lucky author.”

Marion Zimmer Bradley, along with such people as Ann Bannon and Patricia Highsmith, got her start as an author by writing lesbian pulp fiction. As you may expect, times were sometimes rough as these people sought to establish careers as writers. Ms. Bannon remembers that one of Ms. Bradley’s meals consisted of crackers, heated-up ketchup, and salt and pepper.

John Steinbeck once lost an important manuscript: that of the stories that made up his book The Red Pony. No problem. He sat down and rewrote the book. When he later discovered the original manuscript, he compared it with his rewrite and discovered that except for seven words, the manuscripts were exactly the same.

Edward Gorey’s books, of course, are filled with the grotesque and the macabre. Author Alexander Theroux once interviewed him and asked him why his work focused on “stark violence and horror and terror.” Mr. Gorey replied, “I write about everyday life.”

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David Bruce: Authors Anecdotes

Untitled

For years, Newbery Medal-winning children’s book author Lois Lowry carried these two fortune-cookie fortunes in her wallet: YOU WILL BE FAMOUS IN A FAR-OUT PROFESSION and YOU WILL ATTEND A PARTY WHERE STRANGE CUSTOMS PREVAIL. She kept these fortunes because she wished for them to become true. (Actually, she edited one fortune. The original fortune said, YOU WILL BE RICH AND FAMOUS IN A FAR-OUT PROFESSION, but she edited out “RICH AND” because she wasn’t comfortable with an emphasis on money.) By the way, authors are often asked who has most influenced their career. For Newbery Medal-winning children’s book author Lois Lowry, that person was a Czechoslovakian woman named Maria who took care of the children while Ms. Lowry wrote. (Before she hired a housekeeper, a well-traveled path existed between Ms. Lowry’s washing machine and her typewriter.)

William Peter Blatty used to write comedies such as Blake Edwards’ A Shot in the Dark for Hollywood in the 1960s, but the market for these movies dried up, so he wrote the horror novel The Exorcist, then turned it into a screenplay. Of course, The Exorcist became a great horror movie and made him famous. Later, when Mr. Blatty was mentioned as a possible author for a comedy screenplay, a movie studio head was astounded: “William Peter Blatty! The guy who The Exorcist? You want me to hire him for a comedy?”

Children’s book author/illustrator David McPhail believes in taking advantage of inspiration when it strikes. He was awaiting some friends whom he had invited to his house when he was struck by inspiration and began writing Henry Bear’s Park. In the middle of writing the story, he heard a knock at the door. He threw it open, saw his friends, and told them, “I’m in the middle of writing something. Go to the beach and come back in an hour!” An hour later, when they came back, he had finished the story.

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has been married more than once. An in-joke in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban occurs when Professor Trelawny is not looking forward to something that will occur on Friday, October 16—the date when Ms. Rowling married her first husband in 1992. (By the way, as I write this, the end of the seventh and final Harry Potter book has already been written by J.K. Rowling. It is being kept safe and secret in a bank vault somewhere in the United Kingdom.)

Lois Ehlert did not plan to be a writer/illustrator of children’s books, but after taking a class on making homemade books, she needed something to fill the pages of the book she had created. Because she had a vegetable garden, she wrote and illustrated a story that she titled Growing Vegetable Soup. The book was published and suddenly Ms. Ehlert was a writer/illustrator of books for children.

In 1877, Oscar Wilde filled out an American Confession Album, in which he recorded his answers to the many questions asked in the album. When asked, “What is your idea of misery?,” Mr. Wilde wrote, “Living a poor and respectable life in an obscure village.” When asked, “What is your idea of happiness?,” Mr. Wilde wrote, “Absolute power over men’s minds, even if accompanied by chronic toothache.”

As the author of such children’s books as The Two Giants, Eve Bunting finds that she can write anywhere. Because she didn’t have her notebook with her, she once wrote a children’s story on the back of a program in the dark while a play was being performed. On another occasion, she felt inspired while traveling but again didn’t have her notebook with her, so she wrote the story on a “barf” bag.

Even after publishing her children’s book Busybody Nora, Johanna Hurwitz wondered if she had really arrived. However, when she brought her second book, Nora and Mrs. Mind-Your-Own-Business, to her publishing house, her editor told her, “You’re one of us now.” Ms. Hurwitz says, “That’s when I really knew that being a writer was not a fantasy anymore.”

British writer J.G. Ballard, the author of Empire of the Sun, also wrote Crash, which became a movie directed by David Cronenberg. In the novel and movie, characters are sexually turned on by car and truck crashes. The person assigned to first read the novel at a British publishing house wrote on the manuscript, “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!”

Gary Paulsen’s novel Hatchet, about a 14-year-old boy named Brian surviving in the Northern wilderness with the aid of only a hatchet, was so well and realistically written that after it was published, people from the National Geographic Society called Mr. Paulsen to see if they could arrange to interview Brian. By the way, when Gary Paulsen, the popular children’s author of Hatchet, speaks before groups of young readers, he often wears a cap that bears the message, “Read Like a Wolf Eats.”

Adman Jerry Della Femina once wrote a best-seller titled From Those Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor. As a young man, he had proposed that title as the slogan for a new Japanese product, but it was promptly shot down by older people who were more experienced in advertising.Richard Peck, author of such children’s books as Secrets of the Shopping Mall, had an excellent experience with the manuscript of his first novel. He took it himself to an editor, and the very next morning the editor called to tell him, “Start your second novel.”

Alexander the Great was once asked whether he would prefer to be Homer, the author of the Iliad, or Achilles, the hero of the Iliad. He replied, “What do you think? Would you rather win first prize at the Olympic Games or be the man who announces the winners?”

Barbara Taylor Bradford has written a number of popular books, including A Woman of Substance. Asked if she minded being a “popular novelist,” she replied, “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be an unpopular novelist.”

Pauses are important in plays by Harold Pinter, who sometimes complains if actors pause for two dots instead of the three he has written.

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