36. Lit Link

BTW, Toasted Cheese Review is a great website for writers. Check it out at: www.toasted-cheese.com.

UNRELIABLE TRUTH by Maureen Murdock. Exploration of the role of memory in shaping narrative and identity in memoir writing. Murdock uses her own experiences dealing with her Alzheimer-afflicted mother to explore why members of a single family may remember radically different versions of events that affected them all. She claims that memory shapes our identity and that identity shapes how we remember. (trade paper)

Elmore Leonard from the introduction to George Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle:



I was already writing in scenes, trying to move my plots with dialogue while keeping the voices relatively flat, understated. What I learned from George Higgins was to relax, not be so rigid in trying to make the prose sound like writing, to be more aware of the rhythms of coarse speech and the use of obscenities. Most of all, George Higgins showed me how to get into scenes without wasting time, without setting up the scene, where the characters are and what they look like. In other words, hook the reader right away. I also realized that criminals can appear to be ordinary people and have some of the same concerns as the rest of us.



George Higgins learned all this on his own. He majored in English at Boston College, which was my major at the University of Detroit… Higgins went on to Stanford, he said “to learn how to write fiction,” which he found out “can’t be taught, but I didn’t know that then.” I left school to write Chevrolet ads and also failed to learn anything about writing. Higgins joined the

Associated Press as a rewrite man, a step in the right direction he referred to as “like toilet training.” He returned to Boston College for a law degree, got a job as an assistant US attorney and loved it, meeting a parade of characters he would soon be using in his novels.



Still, getting published was tough. Along the way from Stanford to Eddie Coyle, Higgins wrote as many as en books that he either discarded or were rejected by publishers—perhaps for the same reason my first novel with a contemporary setting, The Big Bounce, was rejected by publishers and film producers eighty-four times in all, editors calling the book a “downer,” void of sympathetic characters—the same ones I’m writing about thirty years later. Higgins’s agent at the time of Eddie Coyle read the manuscript, told him it was unsalable and dropped him. Let this be an inspiration to beginning writers discouraged by one rejection after another. If you believe you know what you’re doing, you have to give publishers time to catch up and catch on.