Not very Randian, but this says it all...


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LOL! Going by how so many self-proclaimed "artists" tend to act these days, I think that diagram has quite a degree of empirical truth.

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What did Hemingway say...or, I thought he said...lol about sitting down in front of a typewriter and bleed...

Well, according to the "Quote Investigator"....

Writing Is Easy; You Just Open a Vein and Bleed

Thomas Wolfe? Red Smith? Paul Gallico? Friedrich Nietzsche? Ernest Hemingway? Gene Fowler? Jeff MacNelly? Anonymous?

Dear Quote Investigator: Whenever I have trouble writing I am reminded of a brilliant saying that uses a horrifyingly expressive metaphor to describe the difficult process of composition:

Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.


Quote Investigator: There is significant evidence that Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith used a version of this quote by 1949. In April of that year the influential and widely syndicated newspaper columnist Walter Winchell wrote: 1

Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn’t quite a chore. …”Why, no,” dead-panned Red. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

This is the earliest known attribution to Smith and it was located by top-notch researcher Bill Mullins. But a few years earlier another novelist and highly-paid sportswriter used the same metaphor to describe the often arduous task of putting words down on paper. In the 1946 book “Confessions of a Story Writer” Paul Gallico wrote: 2

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don’t feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you’re wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

Today Gallico is perhaps best known for the novel The Poseidon Adventure which was made into a blockbuster disaster movie in 1972. The popular work was remade for television and for theatrical release in the 2000s. He also wrote the 1941 story Lou Gehrig: Pride of the Yankees that was made into the successful film The Pride of the Yankees.

Then this author goes into super depth...great article.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/14/writing-bleed/

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It was a Dark and Stormy night....

“It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.”

― Charles M. Schulz, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, Snoopy

darkandstormy_5013.jpg

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“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

For more winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Prize see the contest website:

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There is a woman who is my all time favorite for purple prose and bad poetry: Amanda McKittrick Ros.

Here's a poem from her collection "Fumes of Formation":

Visiting Westminster Abbey

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,

Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.


Some choice insults of her critics: "Talent wipers of wormy order," and "Auctioneering agents of Satan."

:smile:

And, of course, some purple prose with a vengeance.

Her description of a young woman who earns her living as a seamstress (From Delina Delaney):

She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father's slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.


A gentleman departs from young Delina with these fine words:

I am just in time to hear the toll of a parting bell strike its heavy weight of appalling softness against the weakest fibres of a heart of love, arousing and tickling its dormant action, thrusting the dart of evident separation deeper into its tubes of tenderness, and fanning the flame, already unextinguishable, into volumes of burning blaze.

Those who are curious about rare Amanda may read more at The Rocks of Regard.

:smile:

Michael

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