Odd Type Writers
From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great AuthorsBook - 2013
Every great writer has a unique way of setting a story to paper. And, it turns out, many of these writers used methods that were just as inventive as the works they produced. Odd Type Writers explores the quirky writing habits of renowned authors, including Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and Alexandre Dumas, among many others.To meet his deadline for The Hunchback of Notre-Dame , Victor Hugo placed himself under strict house arrest, locking up allof his clothes and wearing nothing but a large gray shawl until he finished the book. Virdinia Woolf used purple ink for love letters and diary entries, and to pen her acclaimed novel Mrs. Dalloway . Also, in her twenties, she preferred to write while standing up. Friedrich Schiller kept a drawer full of rotten apples in his study. According to his wife, he couldn't work without that pungent odor wafting into his nose. Eudora Welty evaluated her work with scissors handy. If anything needed to be moved, she cut it right out of the page. Then she'd use pins to put the snipped section in its new place.
In Odd Type Writers , you'll find out why James Joyce wrote in crayon, what Edgar Allan Poe's cat was doing on his shoulder, why Vladimir Nabokov had to keep his feet wet, and the other peculiar tools and eccentric methods used to compose some of the greatest works of all time.