On Writing #1 ✍️: A Mug’s Game
A coffee mug claims to include all “the greatest first lines of literature ever written”… but the sceptic in me found that hard to swallow!
While browsing in a bookshop in Madrid yesterday, I picked up a cool mug with famous opening line from novels.
It claimed to include all “the greatest first lines of literature ever written”, but the sceptic in me found that hard to swallow - pun intended!
In fairness, it did name check many of the usual suspects: F Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Nabokov, Sallinger, Dickens, Tolstoy, and even Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
But it was criminal that my favourite from the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century didn’t cut the mustard: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
It also failed to include Irish-American JP Donleavy, whom I had the great privilege of befriending when I lived near him in Mullingar for over a decade. JP was number 99 on the prestigious list. “I guess that’s better than a kick in the arse,” he once quipped to me.
It quickly dawned on me that the two aforementioned writers weren’t on it simply because of favouritism, or rather lack of, seeing as they weren’t Penguin authors like all the others scribblers included. It kinda summed up that old adage, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”
My absolute favourite writing quote is from Mark Twain, whose dog-eared books with underlined passages from my youth are still within reaching distance at my writing desk.
The quintessential humorist noted: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
I don’t think there have ever been any truer words uttered about prose. My new regular column in British magazine Sorted is 500 words and I find it much harder to condense my usual long-winded POV into that slot than I would if asked to rant at length in a broadsheet.
It’s much easier to waffle, which is one of the main reasons why I’ve always greatly admired scribblers that are economical with words but not the truth. I also believe writing is 90 percent perseverance and you can carve up the other 10% between raw talent and connections. Or as Einstein put it, “Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work…”
I’ve always though all writing projects should be viewed as if every vocable was only the equivalent of a cent and your budget can’t go over the agreed word count. There should be no bridge loans in writing.
For example, I’m allowed myself 415 words for this piece on Substack – and there’s only room for one more w…