Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 501

Sharing a few 'musings' about creating

“I think people who are creative are the luckiest people on earth. I know that there are no shortcuts, but you must keep your faith in something greater than you, and keep doing what you love. Do what you love, and you will find the way to get it out to the world.” – (Singer, lyricist, poet and essayist Judy Collins)***
“To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths.  That’s just the act of all good writing.” – (Novelist, essayist and short story writer William Gibson, who is credited with creating the term “Cyberspace.”).***“It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things – a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring – with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine – the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.” –  (Short story writer and poet Raymond Carver)
***
“I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel.” – (Fantasy/YA writer Rick Riordan) ***
 [image error]Charles Schultz’  - “Peanuts”
May your “creations” be inspiring and delightful as they open doors for readers into wonderful new worlds.  And, may they be prosperous for you as well.  Happy writing . . . and happy weekend.



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Standing out in the crowd

“When I was in college, I did sort of want to be a journalist. Being an actor, you kind of have the same interest. You go into a story, and you tell it from your point of view for people who aren't there. That's what an actor does with a character. But the real life is more interesting.” – Sigourney Weaver
Weaver was nearly 30 and acting for more than 10 years before she became “an overnight success,” but once she got on a roll she never looked back.  It was her work as the lead as Eileen Ripley in the Alien series that put her front and center.  Since then, she’s done dozens of other movies, including a number of comedies, and in recent years she’s also been writing and producing shows.
Her acting has won her numerous awards including Golden Globes as both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in the same year – the first playing Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist and the second in Working Girl.  She also was nominated for Academy Awards for both movies – the only actor or actress to be nominated for the four major acting awards in one year.
 [image error]Sigourney Weaver
Susan Alexandra Weaver was born on this day in 1949 in New York City.  She changed her name to Sigourney because she wanted something that would stand out in a crowd.  A brilliant student as well as actor, she did her undergraduate work at Sarah Lawrence and Stanford and then earned a Master of Fine Arts from Yale.   
While everyone knows her work in the movies, many are surprised at the breadth of her work in theatre, where she has appeared in nearly 40 plays on and off Broadway.  A star in the original Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II, she is reprising her work in the upcoming version of Ghostbusters, due out in 2016.



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Common sense...dancing

“Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.” – Clive James
An Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and humorist who has lived in Great Britain most of his adult life, James was born on this date in 1939 and broke into the writing world in the 1970s as a television critic for The Observer magazine.  He gained a wide reading audience with his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, first published in 1980 and his acclaimed book of biographical essays Cultural Amnesia.  These are really wonderful biographical sketches of many, many famous 20th century figures.
James also has published four novels and several books of poetry, including The Book of My Enemy (2003), a volume that takes its title from his earlier humorous poem "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered”  (the term used in bookselling to put your books in the bargain basement bin).
 [image error]Clive JamesHumor, he said, is an essential part of every writer’s arsenal.  “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
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First write a gripping yarn

“My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.”– David Brin
David Brin, born this day in California, is an American astro-physicist who turned his talents to writing and became an award-winning author of science fiction. He has received the Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Awards – basically a “clean sweep” of all the top awards in his genre.
His Campbell Award winning novel The Postman was adapted as a 1997 feature film that starred Kevin Costner.  His nonfiction book The Transparent Society won both the Freedom of Speech Award (from the American Library Association) and the McGannon Communication Award.   Many of Brin's works focus on the impact on human society of technology humankind develops for itself, most noticeably in his novels The Practice Effect, Glory Season and Kiln People.  [image error] David Brin Also noted for his writings on ethics, Brin is a 2010 fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.  He helped establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination (UCSD) and serves on the advisory board of NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group.
And, he's glad he's a scientist first.  “There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction," he said.   "And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.” 



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Seeking the drama of human spirit

“It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.” – Peter Ackroyd
As a new convert to the writing of historical fiction I am fascinated by writers like Ackroyd who have made it their life’s work, and I wholeheartedly agree with his assessment.
Born on this date in 1949, Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist and critic.   He has written some of the best biographical pieces on luminaries like William Blake, Charles Dickens and T.S. Eliot.  But his historical novels have earned the most acclaim, including the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of his work (36 nonfiction books; 18 novels and 3 books of poetry), and the depth of his research. 
It was his 1982 novel The Great Fire of London, a reworking of Dickens’ Little Dorrit (a terrific example, by the way, of the “serial” writing style that first made Dickens popular) that put Ackroyd on the writing map.    The book set the stage for a long sequence of novels dealing with the complex interaction of time and space and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place.”     Peter Ackroyd -- his newest book is [image error]a biography of Alfred Hitchcock
And while he has written over 50 books, that is not where his true “writing love” lies.   “I don’t think I ever read a novel until I was 26 or 27,” he said.  “I wanted to be a poet … (and) had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history.  But those three elements in my life have become the most important.”   As a new fan of his work, I must add “thankfully so.”


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Along those country byways

“There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets.”  ~Samuel Johnson
 [image error]
  [image error] Photos by Dan Jorgensen
Yesterday, as I read author Helen Hollick’s blog about the peace and quiet of the countryside near her home in Devon, England –  http://chittlehamholtchitchat.blogspot.com/2015/10/ther-peace-and-quiet-of-countryside.html– I was reminded that I needed to post a few shots I'd been saving from a trek to the Colorado high country.   While markedly different from the serenity of her English scenes, the Colorado landscape displays what each writer knows:  Wherever nature is involved, "Writer’s Moments" abound.   Spending time with nature restores almost any writer’s enthusiasm. [image error]  As Charles Dickens once wrote, “It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing on something.”   Happy trails, wherever they may lead.
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Recalling an 'elegant essayist'

“I didn't mean to spend my life writing American history, which should have been taught in the schools, but I saw no alternative but to taking it on myself. I could think of a lot of cheerier things I'd rather be doing than analyzing George Washington and Aaron Burr. But it came to pass, that was my job, so I did it.” – Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal was born on this day in 1925 at West Point where his father was a military officer serving as the first instructor of aeronautics in the Military Academy’s history.   He would become one of the most well-known and sometimes controversial writers in American history, doing novels, essays, screenplays and stage plays and taking on a larger-than-life public role as an intellectual, debater (particularly against conservative writer and spokesman William F. Buckley) and historian. 
“I never wanted to be a writer,” he said when people tried to categorize him.  “I mean, for me, that was the last thing I wanted.”  That having been said, he wrote 28 nonfiction books, 32 novels, 8 plays, and 16 screenplays and teleplays.  Many of his books were best sellers, but especially the gripping historical novels Burr, Lincoln, 1876 and Empire.  The Los Angeles Timessaid that he was a literary juggernaut whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language.”
In 1993, Vidal won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for the anthology United States: Essays 1952–92.   "Whatever his subject,” the award citation read, “he addresses it with an artist's resonant appreciation, a scholar's conscience and the persuasive powers of a great essayist."
 [image error]In his later years (he died in 2012) he lamented what he termed the lack of good American writers.   “For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.”



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Those 'observational' powers

“The great advantage of being a writer is that you're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.” – Graham Greene
Greene's quote also is interesting in that he was believed to have worked as a spy for the British government during World War II and beyond while continuing to hone his writing career.   Born on this day in 1904, he is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, reinforced by author John Irving, who described him as "the most accomplished living novelist in the English language."     Shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Greene produced 25 novels that mostly explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world.  He also wrote short stories, essays, plays and movie scripts and worked as a journalist during a 67-year career.  He was working as an editor on The Times of Londonwhen his first novel, The Man Within, was published in 1929 to immediate critical acclaim.   In 1941, he won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for his masterpiece The Power and the Glory.

 [image error]Considered one of the most “cinematic” of 20th century writers (nearly all of his novels and many of his short stories were made into movies or television shows), his characters are both interesting and controversial, for which Greene had a logical explanation.   “(You know) the moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about.  At that moment he's alive and you just have to leave it to him to do whatever he prefers.”


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Never doubting where it's going

“What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt - it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else.” – Hal Boyle
 [image error]During 30 years with the Associated Press the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hal Boyle wrote 7,680 columns. He is best known for his work as a war correspondent and writer at conflicts and troubled spots around the world.  But in later life, he switched to writing about the natural world. So when I snapped this photo of the North Fork of the South Platte River in Park County, Colorado, I was reminded of his quote above.
To see and hear Boyle, who was born in 1911 and died in 1974, check out the 1945 film dramatization of Ernie Pyle's book, The Story of G.I. Joe, where Boyle portrayed himself.  That’s the same movie, by the way, that made actor Robert Mitchum a star.
Boyle’s column became a staple in over 700 newspapers, and he was one of those “must read” writers for those of us interested in becoming journalists.  I highly commend to you a book of his columns called The Best of Boyle.

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The 'real' and emotional

“I can't speak for readers in general, but personally I like to read stories behind which there is some truth, something real and above all, something emotional. I don't like to read essays on literature; I don't like to read critical or rational or impersonal or cold disquisitions on subjects.”– Laura Esquivel

The author of the award-winning novel (also an award-winning film) Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel is a Mexican novelist, essayist and screenwriter who was born on this day in 1950.  
She has been honored for both her fiction and screenwriting, but has perhaps had her biggest impact with her powerful essays on life, love and food and their impact on the culture of her native Mexico – themes that resonate around the globe.  Esquivel has stated that she believes the kitchen is the most important part of the house and characterizes it as a source of knowledge and understanding that brings pleasure. 
Laura Esquivel[image error]
Despites great success in each, Esquivel gravitates toward fiction writing ahead of screenwriting.
“In film you can use images exclusively and narrate a whole story very quickly, but you don't always so easily find the form in cinema to dig deeper into human thoughts and emotions,” she explained.  “In a novel you can much more easily express a character's inner thoughts and feelings.”

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