The VERB - April '07

WHAT'S ON YOUR DESK?

THOMAS PERRY

The thing I like best about writing is that I can make a living with nothing but a pen and a piece of paper.

The thing I like least about writing is that I have to make a living and all I have to do it with is a pen and a piece of paper.

I don't write at a desk. I pick a level spot somewhere in the house and write there until I'm tired of it, then move on. Sometimes I'm joined by other creatures:

photo: Jo Perry

Thomas has worked as a park maintenance man, factory laborer, commercial fisherman, university administrator, teacher, writer and producer of prime time network television shows. Author of fourteen novels, he has won an Edgar for The Butcher's Boy and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for Metzger's Dog. His other books include Death Benefits, Blood Money, The Face-Changers, Shadow Woman, Dance for the Dead, and Vanishing Act. His next novel, Silence, will be published in July 2007.

CURRENT CONTEST

Sure, anyone can write a 200,000-word novel, but a 500-word story with a beginning, a middle and an ending? Now that requires skill. No dawdling. Every word counts. Yep. Every. Single. Word.

Entry fee: none.
Length: up to 500 words.

Complete details.

SUNSET BOULEVARD
(1950)

Written by:
Billy Wilder
Charles Brackett

Starring:
William Holden
Gloria Swanson

An unsuccessful screenwriter stumbles into the mansion of
faded silent-film star, Norma Desmond, and agrees to write
her "comeback" script.

SAY WHAT? Misused Words

Complacent - pleased with oneself or one’s situation.
“For the life of me, I don’t know how you can be so complacent in this ghastly storm.”

Complaisant – disposed to please; obliging, agreeable.
“Are we tiptoeing around the obvious, then? Complaisant to a fault?”

A MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF WRITING

One day, in the early 1900s, a pencil sharpener wholesaler sat in his rented office, waiting for his salesmen to return with pockets full of orders. While he waited, he thumbed through various magazines to check out his pencil sharpener ads. Those magazines, the famous “pulp fiction,” were a prime source of escapist reading material for the rapidly expanding middle class.

After a while, when the salesmen still hadn’t reported in, he began to read the stories. Before long, he shook his head in disgust. "If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines,” he later said, “I knew I could write stories just as rotten.”

So he went to work. Setting aside the fairy tales and poems he’d previously written for his children, he focused on full-length novels. The first one he submitted was quickly accepted and serialized by All-Story Magazine. The second one, however, was just as quickly rejected. So he thought long and hard about the third one, and eventually came up with the bright idea to write a story about a boy raised in the jungle.

When “Tarzan of the Apes” first appeared in October 1912, not even Edgar Rice Burroughs could’ve known he’d just created a cultural icon.

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