Writers - The Journal Pulp

Posts from the ‘Writers’ Category

Philip K Dick
May 11th, 2013 | Writers | journalpulp | No Comments
He was one strange cat. I don’t always love his literature, but I love his individuality, his originality, his inexhaustible inventiveness, his arrant hatred of authoritarianism, his mad genius — Philip Kindred Dick (nom-de-guerres Richard Phillipps and Jack Dowland), philosophical novelist who bridged the science-fictional and the historical, drug-user, drug-abuser, paranoiac, self-described “acosmic panentheist,” twin [...]
Read More
Literary Pulp
April 18th, 2013 | Writers | journalpulp | 2 Comments
Truman Streckfus Persons was Truman Capote’s real name. The title Finnegans Wake contains no apostrophe in the word Finnegans. Thus Finnegans is a plural and Wake is a verb. Issac Newtons’s father was illiterate. Walt Whitman’s mother was illiterate. Roald Dahl was an anti-semite. Djuna Barnes had no formal education at all. Edmund Wilson once [...]
Read More
“Curiously Dull, Furiously Commonplace, Often Meaningless” (And Other Literary Virtues)
October 10th, 2012 | Writers | journalpulp | 2 Comments
“Rat-eyed” Virginia Woolf described Somerset Maugham as. “No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word,” said Eudora Welty of William Faulkner. “Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless,” Alfred Kazin said of William Faulkner. “Hemingway never climbed out on a limb and never used a word where the reader [...]
Read More
The Strong, The Smart, The Eccentric, The Insane
September 30th, 2012 | Writers | journalpulp | 2 Comments
Jean Jacques Rousseau, grandfather of modern-day environmentalism, who categorically believed in the existence of vampires. Persistent legend that the young Leonardo De Vinci was so strong he could — and frequently did — straighten horseshoes with his bare hands. Charles Dickens, a hyper-manic walker who sometimes went twenty-five miles at a headlong pace. A walk? [...]
Read More
George Orwell: On Writing, On Clarity Of Thought
September 3rd, 2012 | Writers | journalpulp | 2 Comments
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” wrote George Orwell, “and when there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” I confess I myself sometimes feel like that cuttlefish spurting out ink, but [...]
Read More
John Steinbeck In A Funk
August 28th, 2012 | John Steinbeck, Writers | journalpulp | 8 Comments
In 1948, after divorcing his second wife Gwyn, John Steinbeck fell into a funk during which he was able to write almost nothing, except a series of exceptional letters to his editor Pascal (“Pat”) Covici. Here’s a small sampling which I hope you find as life-affirming as I do: September 19, 1948 Dear Pat: You [...]
Read More
Habits Of Highly Effective Writers: Balzac
August 7th, 2012 | Writers | journalpulp | 2 Comments
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years and made innumerable corrections and revisions in the proof sheets of each. This opus he called La Comedie Humaine — or The Human Comedy. Concerning his countless revisions, his first publisher — one Henri Latouche — said, none too politely: “What the devil has gotten [...]
Read More
The Curious Lives — And Deaths — Of Writers And Artists
February 24th, 2012 | Writers | journalpulp | 6 Comments
Under threat of arrest during the Reign of Terror, the French writer Nicolas Chamfort (1741 — 1794) shot himself in the head and slit his own throat. Then died of pneumonia while recovering in his bed. Whereas Lavoisier was guillotined in the Reign of Terror. “A good book is twice as good if it’s short.” Said [...]
Read More
What Do I Write About?
October 4th, 2011 | Plot, Poetry, Storytelling, Subject Matter, The Situation, Writers | journalpulp | No Comments
Anton Chekhov answered that question this way: You could write a story about this ashtray, and a man and a woman. The man and the woman are always the two poles of your story. The North Pole and the South. Every story has these two poles — a he and she. The late Raymond Carver, [...]
Read More
A Game That Writers Play
September 30th, 2011 | Characterization, Plot, Storytelling, Suspense, Writers | journalpulp | 2 Comments
There’s a game that certain writers like to play, and it’s not called Hide-The-Salami (although that game is popular among certain writers as well, myself perhaps foremost among them). In the game I’m talking about, someone — anyone — comes up with a random list of words or components, and the writer is then asked [...]
Read More