It Takes a Certain Type to be a Writer: Facts from the World of Writing and Publishing (Totally Riveting Utterly Entertaining): And Hundreds of Other Facts from the World of Writing - Softcover

Barrett, Erin; Mingo, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573247227 ISBN 13: 9781573247221

Publisher: Conari Press, 2003

Synopsis

Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo are the Queen and King of trivia, relied upon by game shows including Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and game manufacturers. Millions of people read their daily newspaper column and together they've written twenty books. The sixth book in the 'Totally Riveting Utterly Entertaining (TRUE) Trivia Series' puts a magnifying lens on the wacky world of writers. It Takes a Certain Type to Be a Writer will tell you everything you could possibly want, or were afraid, to know about writers, publishing, and the writing life. Bitesized facts are organized into chapters including "Everyone's a Critic," "Stranger than Fiction," "From Bad to Verse," "Kiddie Lit," "A Word's Worth," and many more. You'll learn things like: where Proust wrote (in bed with gloves on)/ what Voltaire drank (70 cups of coffee a day)/ and how James Cain prepared himself for yet another publisher's rejection. (The title The Postman Always Rings Twice had nothing to do with the plot of the bestselling novel. It was a private joke of author James Cain. His postman would ring his doorbell twice whenever the many-times-rejected manuscript came back from a publisher.)

About this title

About the Author

Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo have authored 20 books, including How the Cadillac Got Its Fins, The Couch Potato Guide to Life and the bestselling Just Curious Jeeves. They have written articles for many major periodicals including The New York Times, Salon, Reader's Digest, and The Washington Post and have generated more than 30,000 questions for trivia games and game shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Their website, which lists their "This Day in History" nationallysyndicated column.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It Takes a Certain Type to Be a Writer

And Hundreds of Other Facts from the World of Writing

By ERIN BARRETT, JACK MINGO

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Copyright © 2003 Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57324-722-1

Contents

A Word from the Authors
one Don't Quit Your Day Job
two If at First You Don't Succeed
three What's in a Name?
four The Ties That Bind ... and Sometimes Gag
five Tips & Tricks of the Trade
six Everyone's a Critic
seven Stranger Than Fiction
eight Quoth the Writer
nine From Bad to Verse
ten By the Numbers
eleven You're My Inspiration
twelve Kiddie Lit
thirteen Incognito
fourteen Saints & Sinners, Quirks & Outrages
fifteen "Easy Reading Is Damned Hard Writing"
sixteen A Word's Worth
seventeen Random Facts from the Bibliophiles
eighteen The End
Selected References
Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

Don't Quit Your Day Job

"In America you can make a fortune as a writer, but not a living."

—James Michener

Alas, this has always been the case. A few writers get rich; the rest eke out aliving or are subsidized by inheritance or a patient spouse. Almost all writershave had to work another job to keep from starving.

A survey in 1978 by PEN, the international literary organization, was sodepressing that the organization never bothered to update it. The survey foundthat the median annual income earned by published book writers was $4,700, with68 percent making less than $10,000, and 9 percent earning nothing.

According to the latest from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, beginningsalaries for newspaper staff writers and editorial assistants top off at awhopping $21,000 annually—making them some of the lowest paying jobs of all.After five years on the job, they can expect to make about $30,000.

Senior editors at the largest newspapers average only about $67,000 as a topsalary.

These are the salaried positions; a large proportion of writers and editorsfreelance, making their annual salaries even iffier, and job securitynonexistent.

The most William Shakespeare earned for writing a play was £8 ($1,325 in today'smoney). He never made more than an annual income of £20 ($3,313) from hiswriting. Luckily, his acting career paid a lot better, and he owned some realestate, making him fairly prosperous.

Harriet Beecher Stowe got lucky. She was just a "poor professor's wife" when shewrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her book sold 3,000 copies on its day of publication,and within a year it had sold more than 300,000 copies in the United Statesalone.

"To coin one's brain into silver is, to my thinking, the hardest job in theworld."

—Edgar Allan Poe

Poe should know. It took him eighteen months of badgering to get paid after theNew York Mirror published one of his poems. The poem was "The Raven," and theoverdue payment was $10 ($178 in today's money).

"With the proceeds of my last novel, I purchased a small handbarrow, on which myguests' luggage is wheeled from the station to my house. It needs a coat ofpaint. With the proceeds of my next novel, I shall have it painted."

—Henry James

Before achieving his own fame, a young Sinclair Lewis sold plots and story ideasto Jack London.

Screenwriter Rod Serling was very reluctant to put himself in front of thecamera to host his Twilight Zone TV show. In fact he had to routinely changeshirts during filming because they became saturated with nervous sweat. Histense and terse delivery caught on, however, and he found himself spending moretime on camera than writing. His creative output went further downhill a fewseasons later when he was hired as host—without any creative input—for theabysmal Night Gallery. But at least he mercifully died during open-heart surgerybefore hitting rock bottom: he had been scheduled to begin hosting a 1976comedy-variety show called Keep on Truckin'.

Dr. Pearl Zane Grey, a moderately successful dentist, became more successful bywriting Western novels in between drilling patients (dropping the "Dr." and hisfirst name for his literary works).

No wonder all of his stories were tinged with such paranoia: Franz Kafka was acivil servant who only dabbled with writing in his spare time.

Anthony Trollope worked for the British post office for thirty-three years.During that time he wrote four dozen novels by rising at 5:30 A.M. and writing athousand words before trudging off to work. Within postal circles, however, hisbiggest claim to fame is that he invented the street-corner mailbox.

Another man of letters (literally!) was William Faulkner, who was postmaster ofOxford, Mississippi.

Charles Bukowski and Richard Wright both worked as mail carriers.

Leo Tolstoy found God and gave up writing fiction between 1878 and 1885 in favorof writing about his religious beliefs and society. He also gave up his propertyand sex life, denounced his former writings, and began working in the fieldsdressed as a peasant. Because of his fame as a former novelist, people madepilgrimages from all over the world to visit him and hear his word. The RussianOrthodox Church became so threatened by his ever-increasing spiritual powerthat, in 1901, it excommunicated him.

Horatio Alger wrote 134 rags-to-riches books about plucky poor boys being takenhome and adopted by rich industrialists. His career as a Unitarian minister hadbeen cut short in 1886 when a church committee investigated rumors of his"inordinate and imprudent" attention to the boys of his congregation. Accused ofmolesting two of them, he was allowed to resign his position. It was then thathe began writing full time.

Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, was himself a lawyer who rootedfor the underdog. He was admitted to the California bar in 1911 and was knownfor defending poor Chinese and Mexican immigrants. In the 1940s, with some ofhis royalties, Gardner set up "The Court of Last Resort," an organization thattook on cases of people who seemed unjustly imprisoned.

Poet Wallace Stevens was an executive in the legal department of the HartfordInsurance Company. An aside he was heard to mutter at one of his few poetryreadings: "If only the boys back in the office could see me now."

Before they became the household names they are today, Cynthia Ozick, DorothySayers, and Joseph Heller all wrote advertising copy.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote press releases for General Electric.

Amy Tan wrote horoscopes.

Before her literary career took off, Rita Mae Brown wrote screenplays, mostnotably for Roger Corman's schlock slasher film Slumber Party Massacre in 1982.

Henry David Thoreau was a pencil maker.

"O. Henry" (William Sydney Porter) began writing short stories while working asa bank teller. Unfortunately, he was convicted of embezzlement and was sentencedto five years in the federal penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio. His crime hadattracted some notoriety, so he didn't want to use his real name for hiswriting. Porter tried out a number of pseudonyms before—true to his larcenouspast—he "borrowed" the name of prison guard Orrin Henry.

Charles Dickens as a desperately poor child was forced to work at a shoe polishfactory in London.

Young Langston Hughes was a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel, but it gave himan opportunity. At a formal dinner, he placed a packet of his poems next to poetVachel Lindsay's plate. Lindsay liked what he saw and helped launch Hughes'scareer, making the former busboy a leading player in the Harlem Renaissance ofthe 1920s.

Henry Miller worked as a branch manager for Western Union for nearly five years,a period that he said was "comparable for me to Dostoyevksy's stay in Siberia."

In Abraham Lincoln's time, Walt Whitman labored as a low-level clerk in the U.S.Government's Indian Department (later called the Bureau of Indian Affairs).Whitman was a loyal employee—his mournful poem, "Oh Captain, My Captain," waswritten about Lincoln's assassination.

Another poet fared better in the federal bureaucracy. In 1905, E. A. Robinsonhad not sold a poem for five years when he got an out-of-the-blue fan letterfrom President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt arranged to have his own publishertake Robinson on, talked favorably about his poetry from the "bully pulpit" ofthe presidency, and hired Robinson into the Customs Department in New York City.The poet's only responsibilities there were to open his roll-top desk, read thepaper for a while, close his desk, and leave the paper on his chair as he leftso that his boss would know he'd been there. When William Howard Taft tookoffice, though, Robinson was unceremoniously informed that he'd have to actuallystart working. He quit immediately.

Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, was London's first police magistrate.

In 1842, Washington Irving was appointed ambassador to Spain.

Julia Ward Howe should've gotten rich for writing the much-performed "BattleHymn of the Republic" (even if she stole the melody from a song called "JohnBrown's Body"). She didn't. In fact, Ward was paid a mere $4 from the AtlanticMonthly.

"In twenty years, I've never had a day when I didn't have to think aboutsomebody else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it."

—Alice Munro

The first woman in history to actually earn a living as an author was probablyBritisher Aphra Behn (1640–1689), who wrote a number of well-received plays,poems, and novels. She's buried in Westminster Abbey.

Other day jobs of famous writers:

• Honoré de Balzac: law clerk

• Daniel Defoe: seller of tobacco

• Oliver Wendell Holmes: physician

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: physician and ophthalmologist

• William Carlos Williams: pediatrician

• Benedict de Spinoza: lens grinder

• George Orwell: Indian Imperial Police Officer in Burma

• Paul Laurence Dunbar: elevator operator

• A. E. Houseman: clerk at the patent office

• Nathaniel Hawthorne: customs inspector

• Eric Hoffer: longshoreman

• Washington Irving: diplomat

• Herman Melville: sailor

• Charles Lamb: accountant

• Marianne Moore: librarian

• Vladimir Nabokov: entomologist

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: pilot

• Sir Walter Scott: attorney

• Lew Wallace: major general in the Union Army

• J. R. R. Tolkien: professor of Anglo-Saxon language and literature

• Thomas Hardy: architect

• Joseph Wambaugh: cop

• Tom Paine: corset maker

Profits & Loss

Mark Twain bought one of the first telephones in 1876, the same year thatAlexander Graham Bell patented it. Unfortunately, though, his love of newinventions was his downfall. He invested the bulk of the fortune he had madefrom books—about $200,000, or the equivalent of almost $4 million in today'smoney—in an automatic typesetting machine that didn't pan out. As a result, hebecame unable to pay his debts in 1895 and had to embark on a series of newbooks and speaking tours to recoup at least some of his personal savings. Hisloss, our gain.

Jack London was the first American author to earn a million dollars from hiswriting. He unfortunately lost the vast bulk of it to high living and badinvestments.

Anaïs Nin wrote her famous erotica for hire because she needed the money. Shehad an anonymous rich patron who paid her $1 a page. She was told, "Take out allthe poetry, it has to be nothing but descriptions of sex."

"I now have a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself."

—Henry David Thoreau, putting the best possibleface on a bad situation. His publisher hadjust sent him 706 unsold remainders (out of athousand copies printed) of A Week on theConcord & Merrimack Rivers.

Thomas Paine's revolutionary tract Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in the firstthree months of 1776. He could've made a fortune but ended up losing money onthe deal. He had refused to take a penny of the profits, earmarking half for thepublisher for taking the risk of being shut down by the British and the otherhalf to buy mittens for Revolutionary Army troops. Unfortunately, the greedypublisher ended up taking it all. Worse, he had gotten Paine to pay theprinter's bill and never reimbursed him for it.

Leo Tolstoy's library and manuscripts were destroyed by a mob of peasants in1917.

Louisa May Alcott detested children but wrote Little Women solely because shewas short of cash and her publisher demanded "a girl's story" from her.

Successful children's author Margaret Wise Brown went through her royalty checksas fast as she could get them. She blew her very first royalty check bypurchasing a vendor's entire cart full of flowers.

CHAPTER 2

If at First You Don't Succeed

There are hundreds of examples of publishers rejecting books that subsequentlyturned out to be bestsellers. Here are excerpts from actual rejection letters ascollected in a wonderful book called Rotten Rejections by Andre Bernard:

• The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: "An endless nightmare. I do not believe itwould take.... I think the verdict would be 'Oh don't read that horridbook.'"

• The Bridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle: "A very bad book."

• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck: "Regret that the American public is notinterested in anything on China."

• Sanctuary by William Faulkner: "Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be injail."

• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: "You have buried your novel underneath a heapof details which are well done but utterly superfluous."

• The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank: "The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have aspecial perception or feeling which would lift that book above the 'curiosity'level."

• Lord of the Flies by William Golding: "It does not seem to us that you have beenwholly successful in working out an admittedly promising idea."

• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame: "The form of the story is mostunexpected."

• The Last of the Plainsmen by Zane Grey: "I do not see anything in this toconvince me you can write either narrative or fiction."

• Poem by Sara Haardt: "This poem I can't take. We have 200 or 300 bales of poetrystored in Hoboken, in the old Norddeutscher-Lloyd pier. There are 300,000 poetsin America."

• Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl: "The idea of men adrift on a raft does have acertain appeal, but for the most part this is a long, solemn and tedious Pacificvoyage."

• The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman: "If you insist on rewriting this stuff, getrid of all that Indian stuff."

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce: "The point of view isnot an attractive one."

• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer: "Profanity and obscenity.... In myopinion it is barely publishable."

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: "I am most disturbed at the thought that the writerhas asked that this be published. I can see no possible cause that could beserved by its publication. I recommend that it be buried under a stone for athousand years."

• Animal Farm by George Orwell: "It is impossible to sell animal stories in theU.S.A."

• Swann's Way (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust: "I can't see why achap should need thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before goingto sleep."

• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: "It is badly written and the hero isunsympathetic."

• Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg: "Rather out of our line. I dare you to do us asoft and luscious lyric, capable of reducing a fat woman to sniffles."

• And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss: "It's too differentfrom other juvenile books on the market to warrant its selling."

• Lust for Life by Irving Stone: "A long, dull novel about an artist."

• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole:"Obsessively foul and grotesque."

• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: "It is not interesting enough for the generalreader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader."

• Mankind in the Making by H. G. Wells: "Only a minor writer of no large promise."

• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman: "We deem it injudicious to commit ourselves."

• Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde: "My dear sir, I have read your manuscript.O, my dear sir."

CHAPTER 3

What's in a Name?

The Dewey Decimal System is named for Melvil Dewey, who developed it in 1876.Dewey served as the director of the New York State Library from 1889 to 1906 andfounded the American Library Association in 1876. He also started the firstlibrary school in America in 1887, at Columbia University.

You've likely heard of the Scarlet Pimpernel, but perhaps you've wondered—whatexactly is a pimpernel? No, not a type of dark bread nor a backup singer forGladys Knight ... a pimpernel is a type of primrose that also comes in blue,purple, and white and was once known as "the poor man's weather glass" becauseits flowers close at the approach of bad weather. Author Emmuska Orczy, anEnglish baroness born in Hungary, had her character in the story use a pimpernelas his flower calling card, the way the Lone Ranger used a silver bullet andZorro used a Z.

The Postman Always Rings Twice had nothing to do with the mail service. Thetitle was a private joke of author James Cain. His postman would ring hisdoorbell twice whenever the many-times-rejected book's manuscript came back froma publisher.

You might well wonder where Sir A. Conan Doyle came up with the name "SherlockHolmes." The detective began as "Sherrinford Hope," which clearly wasn't up tosnuff, so the cricket-playing author adopted the last name of a player namedMordecai Sherlock on a rival Cricket team from Yorkshire. The "Hope" had comefrom the whaling ship Hope, but Doyle replaced it in honor of Oliver WendellHolmes who, like Doyle, happened to be a writer/doctor.

Sam Spade's first name was a secondhand discard—mystery writer Samuel DashiellHammett had stopped using his first name years earlier.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from It Takes a Certain Type to Be a Writer by ERIN BARRETT, JACK MINGO. Copyright © 2003 Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Conari Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573247227
• ISBN 13: 9781573247221
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 194