Page Fright | Harry Bruce

This episode of Books for Men features Page Fright by Harry Bruce. A fun read about the fetishes and foibles of famous writers. The book will remind you of the many (often conflicting) ways writers write. Where to write? When to write? What tools to use? How fast to write? Alcohol? Good luck charms? And, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Listen for more!

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Welcome back to Books for Men, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. This week, I have a really fun book to share with you, and I use that word pretty precisely because that's exactly what the reading experience is, especially if you are a writer, I would say. The title of the book is Page Fright, and it's by Harry Bruce. Harry Bruce is a Canadian writer. He's a journalist. He's not super well-known, but an author of a bunch of books, maybe 20 or so, mostly all non-fiction, including this one, which is a documentation of the fetishes and foibles of famous writers. But the thing that makes it even more interesting, to me anyway, it's also the history of writing. So, it's funny to see people resist change in mock, and then of course that thing that they're mocking becomes the standard inside of the industry.

(01:09)

And I think this is a universal idea that we all have to deal with on some level, no matter what industry we are working in or what time period we happen to live in. Generationally, things change. I mean, I think we're starting to see that now, right? With all this talk about AI and how it's going to revolutionize or destroy or just change, definitely the writing industry, but also a lot of other industries as well. And I think that this kind of leads right up to that because this book documents all the way back to when they were using stone slabs in etchings and symbols and lambskin, I think it even talks about in the book that the Bible took 200 lambs to make, which is pretty remarkable. And then, you know, of course, that went from lambskin to tree paper and then eventually to quills.

(02:05)

And then what was the best quill was the goose quill. Then that went to steel nibs and dip pens and fountain pens and ballpoint pens eventually to pencils. And then there was a huge resistance as I was just speaking about moving to typewriters, and then from typewriters to word processors, and then to Dictaphones. And I think that this is kind of where I draw the line because I'm a fan of the laptop, which of course is a derivative of the word processor, and I've never gotten into using any kind of speech-enabled assistance for my writing. I think that this is probably something that you see a lot of journalists do, or maybe there are a lot of other writers that do it too. But I don't know of too many prose writers that do it that way. Although now with the AI-assisted technology we have, this raises a much bigger question.

(03:07)

And I can imagine there will be a lot of resistance to the idea of using AI to create pros. I, for one, would properly be part of that resistance <laugh> for me. I just feel like there's still something to be said for the handmade novel. And I use air quotes because maybe that will be a thing. One deck, just like there are handmade items that we pay more money for because we know they were actually created by an artisan, say like a, I don't know, pair of shoes, maybe that's a good example. There are handmade Italian leather shoes made by artisans in Italy that usually cost a lot more money than the ones that are put together by machines or child labor, sadly. But this is the world that we live in, and maybe that will be a thing. I don't want to get too far off the beaten path, but that might actually bode well for people who stick with the old standard of actually writing your novel by hand, and you become more valuable in that sense.

(04:14)

But this is some crazy plot for a not-too-distant future science fiction novel. Or at least it sounds like one but could be reality. There are plenty of examples of that in that genre where things have certainly come true that were predicted many, many years ago. But anyway, let's get back to this book and what you can expect from reading it, because as I led this episode off with, it is a fun read, and it's fun primarily because of not just the history of writing. That is only important because as you learn all of the fetishes and foibles of all these famous writers, they often intertwine with a lot of the tools that I mentioned just moments ago. But it also has a lot of famous writers making commentary on other famous writers, which is pretty interesting considering that now you can look back with perspective and see how those writers held up, which doesn't really matter except for the fact that it's just interesting to see what other writers were saying about this particular writer who now might be regarded as great or amazing.

(05:21)

You know, one of the topics that comes up a lot in the book, it's actually a whole section, is about speed. And of course, many writers write at many different speeds. So some write extremely fast and some write extremely slow. And I think just as an overarching general rule about this book particularly, what it really illuminates, is how many different ways there are to go about this thing called writing. And there is no right way. And I think that's the best aspect of this book because you get to see such a vast array of ideologies and theories and good luck charms and all kinds of weird stuff that all these writers did in order to just achieve one thing, which was getting words on the page consistently. And I think that that is the most important thing to remember. Whatever you have to do to get words on the page consistently, do it. And I think that that's the overarching thing here.

(06:14)

But going quickly back to that speed thing, Shakespeare was notoriously a really fast writer. And so, hundreds of years later, Dostoevsky wrote a letter to his brother, and he was commenting on Shakespeare, and he said, “A thing that has been written all at once cannot be ripe. They say there was not a blot on Shakespeare's manuscripts. That is why there are so many enormities and so much bad taste in him. He would've done much better if he had worked harder.” So this is of course really funny because Shakespeare is widely regarded as perhaps the most important individual in modern storytelling. But maybe there's a hinted truth in what Dostoevsky is saying, who knows? But this is the fun thing. When you're reading this book, you get to see stuff like that. But as I mentioned, there are a lot of different and varying opinions on speed and how long you should sit with the work or whether you should talk about the work at all.

(07:11)

There are a lot of opinions on that as well. And of course, the tool aspect. George Orwell was supposedly the first great writer to ever favor the ballpoint pen. And there's a long line of people who wrote on yellow legal pads. One of them we've already featured on this podcast in the past Elmore Leonard supposedly loved the yellow legal pad, along with Isaac Asimov and Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison and Gore Vial, William Styron and Susan Sontag, Nelson DeMille. They all supposedly loved the yellow legal pad. I don't know why, but they did. John Grisham, he's another one, supposedly, he wrote his first novel, A Time to Kill on a yellow legal pad. And then, of course, there's the transition from the long-hand tools to the word processor or the typewriter. And there's a lot of ideas on that.

(08:04)

Tom Robbins said, “I missed the contact with the page. I like the idea of ink flowing out of my hand and saturating the page. There's something intimate about that.” Or, Robert Stone, “On a typewriter or word processor you can rush something that shouldn't be rushed. You can lose nuance, richness, and lucidity. The pen compels lucidity.” And then there's the dark cloud that hangs over writing, which is alcohol. And everybody has differing opinions on alcohol. So should you drink when you write? Should you not drink when you write? Who actually drank when they wrote, who actually didn't drink when they wrote like Vonnegut or Updike or Flannery O'Connor, and Margaret Atwood, who all have been cited as saying they don't. And then you obviously have plenty of authors who have been notorious drinkers, but even those say like Hemingway who was known to enjoy his spirits. He goes as far as saying that he didn't drink while he wrote. He drank before he drank after, but not actually while he was writing.

(09:06)

And under this section, not surprisingly, we first hear from Hunter Thompson who was interviewed by the Paris Review, and they said to him, “… almost without exception, writers we've interviewed over the years admit they cannot write under the influence of booze or drugs.” And he snapped back, “They lie. Or maybe you've been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers. It's like saying almost without exception, women we've interviewed over the years swear that they've never indulged in sodomy—without saying that you did all your interviews in a nunnery. Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Fitzgerald? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please, who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelations? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?”

(09:55)

And of course, I can barely get through this passage without laughing because that's just what Hunter Thompson invokes in me. And I think this might be a good place to end this episode. I think you've got a pretty good idea of what you will experience in reading this book. Again, I highly recommend it, especially if you are a writer. This book will land extremely well. It's so fun to read. There will be a healthy dose of quotes in the newsletter. I have so many notes, as you can imagine from this book. And don't forget that. Now, you can also get the full transcript of this episode and every other episode on the website BooksforMen.org. This is where I remind you that if you enjoyed today's episode, as much as I enjoyed recording it because I did have fun with this one, as you can hear by my giggles, I guess. Please remember to share it with friends and family members and other people that you think might enjoy it, because word of mouth is everything when it comes to spreading awareness. And with this podcast specifically, it's inspiring more men to read and bringing together men who do. And I need your help to do that.

(11:10)

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