John Steinbeck, they say, listened to the steady hum of the washing machine to keep himself in the mood for daily writing. He used pencils. ?Must be round,? he insisted. ?A hexagonal pencil cuts my fingers after a long day?...
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John Steinbeck, they say, listened to the steady hum of the washing machine to keep himself in the mood for daily writing. He used pencils. ?Must be round,? he insisted. ?A hexagonal pencil cuts my fingers after a long day.? Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address with a pencil - whether round or hexagonal hasn?t been recorded.

Strange are the ways of authors. So strange, in fact, that readers get somewhat disappointed when they fail to spot oddity in writers. Many people think horror writers do their writing in the dead of the night. Mystery writer Kelly Armstrong says when people run into her, the first thing they observe is, ?...but you seem so normal.?

Steinbeck opted classical music whenever the washing machine wasn?t on. Stephen King went for heavy metal while writing. Daina Chaviano, a Cuban writer, is music-driven as well. She says she starts writing early in the morning and keeps going till she?s tired, which could be three in the afternoon or, on occasions, 11 p.m. We have Neil Gaiman who says, ?As far as I am concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.? In a media interview he says, ?All my life I?ve felt that I was getting away with something, because I was just making things up and writing it down.?

Aren?t these writers sending confusing signals to someone with literary aspirations? The last thing a rookie can expect from many an established writer is encouragement. Steinbeck said the book writing profession made horse racing seem, by comparison, like a solid, stable business. Gustave Flaubert was a shade more encouraging - ?Writing is a dog?s life, but the only life worth living.?

David Higham in his book, Literary Gent, says there are three groups of writers. In Group One huddles the boy in his garret who writes down a dozen words, reads them over, and says, ?I wonder if Tolstoy would have written that.? In Group Three sits another who drops his gold-mounted pen on his leather-topped desk, and says, ?That must be good, I wrote it.? In between, to the large and varied Group Two, belong all the writers worth reading.

Which doesn?t mean they are all read. Founder-editor of The New Yorker apparently had his prejudices. At a dinner with writer Vincent Brome, Ross is reported to have observed, ?English writers give me a pain in the ass.?

Brome to Ross: ?All of them??

Ross: ?There was a man called Bernard Shaw. Is he still alive??

Brome: ?Yes, but I doubt whether he would be prepared to write for The New Yorker.?

Ross to Brome: ?Young man, we don?t want Bernard Shaw to write for us.?

Brome: ?Why, on account of his being communist??

Ross: ?No, on account of being old hat.?

I lifted this snatch of conversation from Vincent Brome?s Confessions of a Writer.

Reading about writers describing things and the rituals they adopt, it is fairly clear that a common characteristic of authors is that they inherit or tend to acquire a certain unsoundness of mind. Joe Loya, in an interview with LA Weekly, teaches us that we could make a wall move when we stare at the same spot on the wall for an hour - ?I thought the universe was static; this taught me it was fluid.? Profound, but who is this Loya?

A street thug who morphed into a published writer, Loya says he sought salvation through writing during jail term - eight years of maximum security hard time, of which two years were spent in solitary confinement. That was when he discovered the power of the written word. His memoir is titled The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber. He says robbing banks in the US was easy. The FBI instructed tellers to hand over the money and let the robbers walk out. The idea was to make a bank job seem so easy that robbers kept going until they got caught. Joe Loya did 30 banks before they nabbed him.

Arguably, Loya?s route to writing success wouldn?t be easy to emulate, whatever he might say about robbing banks. Nikki Ashley, author of When Fate Meets the Delete Key and Don?t Censor Your Tears, has a better recipe for those with flair for chic lit. As Nikki put it in a self-appraisal, ?I?m one of those girls who falls in love between traffic lights; I love to read and write, have fantastic eye-contact, eat cookies for breakfast, and dance in my shower.? And, she adds reassuringly, ?I am not exactly on the side of angels.?

There is this book talking about varied other ways writers adopt to get started on their creative process. Writer?s Desk, a book of 1996 vintage, now out of print, describes the how, when and where of writings of 56 authors, with photographs by Jill Krementz. She has spent a lifetime photographing authors. Her collections cover over 1,600 writers.

John Updike, who wrote the introduction to the book, worked from three desks. In his formative years as New Yorker staff writer, Updike did the magazine writing from a given desk, while he used the other two for writing books and answering mail.

Rita Dove did her work standing up on the desk built for her by her father. She usually started writing at dusk after lighting candles in her study. Walker Percy wrote in bed. Tennessee Williams took a glass of wine before starting and had two typewriters on his desk. George Simenon, credited with having finished a novel in 11 days, went through a medical check-up to ensure he was in good shape before getting down to it. And then he went into seclusion, without seeing or speaking to anyone for days till he had finished the manuscript.

A general observation Jill made about the writers she had photographed was that none of them had enough bookshelves - ?I haven?t been to a writer?s office where there weren?t just piles and piles of books everywhere.? Art Buchwald, they say, cluttered his office with something else - bundles of fan mail, with the most interesting among them stuck on the office walls. Among the certificates that found wall space were the ones that said - ?Are you a writer or an idiot??, ?You stink,? and ?We girls think you most contemptible; go to hell.?

Buchwald has confessed that he did not always find writing a breeze. He once tried to write a pornographic book, but found that he could not proceed beyond 28 words. To reproduce the unfinished manuscript in its entirety:

?Harry looked at the two girls in his bed and shook his head. How could he ever satisfy both of them and still make the 7.10 for Scarsdale.?

Having written so much, Buchwald shook his head wondering, ?Is this something the supreme court would want to read?? This was how Buchwald?s unfinished work came to be immortalized in an anthology of porn literature.<p align=center>GVK's Other Works :: GVK's Archived Works :: GVK's Profile