Have you noticed that Mathew McConaughey can't keep his shirt on even in movies where it makes no sense to take it off?  I was watching How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days yesterday and there's this scene where he decides to change his shirt at work, much to the delight of his female co-workers.  I imagine the meeting with screen writer and director went somethng like this:

Director - Nice job on the script, but remember Mr.  McConaughey needs to take his shirt off sometime in the first ten minutes of the film.

Screen Writer - That has nothing to do with the story.

Director - Tell that to Mathew.  His agent made it part of his contract.

Screen Writer - You're kidding me.

Director - Nope.  Look at clause seventeen.

I'm pretty sure that's the way it went down, and I'm not saying the dude doesn't have abs.  It just makes me chuckle.  Greg 

Every once in a while I take a month off from blogging just to see if the world will still go 'round.  Yep, it did.  What was I worried about?

Okay, here's the question that most writers have to face—is it better to work with an agent or is it better go it alone?  As some of you know (yes, I mean the millions of people reading this blog), I sold the Melvin Beederman series on my own, but recently I've placed all my future, nonMelvin Beederman work in the capable hands of Caryn Wiseman over at the Andrea Brown Agency.  This agency currently represents two thirds of The Disco Mermaids and Neil Schusterman, to name a few.  More about Andrea Brown and Company in a future blog.  Happy 2008!  Greg

Hello, world.  The other day I sat down and chatted with William Faulkner, Nobel Prize winning author of The Sound and The Fury and As I Lay Dying.  Here's what he had to say.

Greg: You start.  I can't think of a good interview questiton yet.

William: Okay, here goes.  If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

Greg: Eating!  My favorite subject.  Let's talk ice cream.

William: Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.

Greg: Okay, back to writing.  How about a tip for writers, you Nobel Prize winner you.

William: Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

Greg: What if you don't have a window?

William: Who doesn't have a window?

Greg: Homeless people.  But let's move on.  You've had your disputes with Earnest Hemingway over style.  Any thoughts?

William: He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to a dictionary.

Greg: A guy after my own heart.  Plus, he likes to fish!

William: A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

Greg: Okay, I'll behave.  I'll stop talking about Hemingway.

William: Please do.  Now back to writing...A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

Greg: Go on...you're on a roll.

William: Which is considerably better than being on a croissant.

Greg: Bill, you made a funny!

William: You bring it out in me.  Okay, moving on...the writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then.

Greg: Any last words?

William: Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. 

Greg: One more, Bill.  Please?

William: Stop calling me Bill.  Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him. 

The other day I sat down to chat with Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach.  Here's what he had to say...

Greg: I notice that your books are loaded with silliness and nonsense.

Roald: A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.

Greg: You are a funny guy.

Roald: I believe that the writer for children must be a jokey sort of fellow.

Greg: What inspired you to write about Charlie Bucket and Willy Wonka?

Roald: On the way to school and on the way back we always passed the sweet-shop. We always stopped. We lingered outside its small window gazing in at the big glass jars.  And I began to realise that the large chocolate companies actually did possess inventing rooms, and they took their inventing very seriously.

Greg: What's the most difficult part of being a full-time writer?

Roald: A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

Greg: Please, stop sugar coating it.

Roald: The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.  Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.  

Greg: One last question.  I think the world is dying to know, what exactly is Whizpopping?

Roald: Pull my finger. 

I sat down recently with my good pal Earnest Hemingway, Pulitzer Prize winner of the Old Man and the Sea, and author of The Sun Also Rises.  Here's what he had to say about writing.

Greg: Do you have a tip or two about writing?

Earnest: There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. 

Greg: Gulp! 

Earnest: Gesundheit!

Greg: That wasn't a sneeze.

Earnest: Sorry

Greg: Why is it that your prose are so spare and unadorned?

Earnest: If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

Greg: In other words?

Earnest: Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over....My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Greg: You'd make a good chapter book writer, you know?

Earnest: You think?

Greg: Any last words of advice?

Earnest: We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.  There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

Greg: Dang!

Earnest:  I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.