So, during my lunch hour, as I sit behind my desk in my chambers overlooking the city and the lake where I’ve spent most of my life, I eat. I read. Then I nap. All three things are routine and important. Right now, I’m reading Mark Twain’s Autobiography, a monster work and a monster (according to amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com) hit. But sometimes, after finishing lunch, I’ll read magazines. The Sun is a favorite. So is Ducks Unlimited Magazine and The Sierra Club Magazine. And of course, the journal I’ve been subscribing to for as long as I’ve been a fiction writer (20 plus years now), Poets and Writers, is always at the top of my office reading stack.
The January/February issue of P&W has a lot of neat stuff in it, including an uplifting column for down-and-out writers entitled “Why We Write: The Ham-and-Egger” by Jenny Shank. There’s much good advice for struggling writers like me in the column, advice I could, but will not, in the interest of space (and my aversion to plagerism lawsuits) repeat here. However, I can’t resist sharing Jenny’s (I feel like I know her, I mean, we’re both fiction writers) best line with you all. The passage deftly describes how Shank hung on every word in Little Women as a young reader, and how she reacted to watching a documentary about Louisa May Alcott’s writing:
I was riveted to learn about the life of Alcott, whose books I had devoured as a kid. I’d been mad at her for not letting Laurie and Jo get married, and for marrying Jo off to some old, bearded professor whom we didn’t even know. A good way to creep out ten-year-old-girls is to make them imagine one day marrying a dude with a beard…
That last line caused me to roar. The truth is often simple: We see it every day in real life and in the writing of others. Thanks, Jenny, for pointing out the obvious.
Peace.
Mark
