SECRETS OF FAMOUS WRITERS

I. THOROUGHNESS


SIR ISAAC NEWTON --

     “Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.” 

He appeals to me, not for thoroughness, but for his habit of often getting up, 

sitting on the side of the bed, and looking off into space for sometimes an hour.   

A man after my own heart!!

     But he wrote his CHRONOLOGY 15 times before he was satisfied with it.

EDWARD GIBBONS --

     “The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.”

     The great historian wrote MEMOIRS 9 times!



II. PERSEVERANCE

BENJAMIN DISRAELI --

     “Most people die with their music still locked up inside them.”

     He reached success only through a series of literary failures 

that his critics mocked as "indications of literary lunacy."

C.S. LEWIS -- 

     “She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”  
      
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was rejected more than 800 times before he was accepted.



III. REWRITING

STEPHEN KING --

"Talent is cheaper than table salt.  

What separates talented individuals from successful authors is a lot of hard work and re-writes."

ERNEST HEMINGWAY --

"The first draft of anything is shit."   

He wrote 47 different endings to A FAREWELL TO ARMS.



JOYCE CAROL OATES --

"The pleasure is the rewriting."


IV. AUTHENTICITY

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD --

"You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, 

not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.

This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper,

when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers.

It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood.

Ernest Hemingway’s first stories ‘In Our Time’ went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. 

In ‘This Side of Paradise’ I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile."

WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE SOME OF 

THE SECRETS OF GREAT WRITING?