Writing, reading, more writing

Annie Dillard's 'The Writing Life' & Perry Mason's author revived me

My planned 3-hour morning writing schedule frequently got cancelled a lot lately. What derailed things is unimportant. But in the wake of reading Annie Dillard’s tome about her writing and experiences, I read about the writing schedule of Erle Stanley Gardner. He wrote 80 Perry Mason novels.

Pretty freaking impressive, si?

More impressive was that he would write a minimum of 4,000 words per day, usually late in the night. Four thousands words. Cripes! That’s makes my literary hero Jack London’s 1,000 words per day seem paltry.

I read about Gardner’s life in Garrison Keillor’s daily missive about famous folks’ birthdays. (The full text is below.)

But it gave me a bit of a kick in the butt to get back to writing more — along with a decision to shift my writing time. Maybe expand it would be a better description. Until now, I have always done my writing in the morning hours, a carryover from years of writing for afternoon newspapers. That meant showing up at 7 a.m., pounding the keyboard for three or four hours writing stories to make an 11 a.m. Afternoons (and evenings!) were devoted to chasing news to write up for the following morning’s writing.

While I doubt I will ever become a true night owl, it seems like the late evening hours might be what I need to carve out more time. Vamos a ver. In the meantime, here’s what Garrison had to say this morning about the prolific Gardner. He led quite a life.

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By Garrison Keillor

“It's the birthday of detective novelist Erle Stanley Gardner, born in Malden, Massachusetts (1889). He earned money through high school by participating in illegal boxing matches. He went on to Valparaiso University to study law, but after only a month, he got kicked out for boxing. So he studied law on his own, and he passed the California bar exam when he was 21. He went to his swearing-in ceremony after a boxing match, and said that he was probably the only attorney in the state to be sworn in with two black eyes.

He liked working as a lawyer, but it wasn't enough to keep him busy, so he started writing detective fiction for pulp magazines. In 1933, he published The Case of the Velvet Claws, his first novel featuring detective and defense attorney Perry Mason, who always pulled through and won cases for the underdogs. Gardner wrote more than 80 Perry Mason novels, and his books have sold more than 300 million copies.

He said: "I still have vivid recollections of putting in day after day of trying a case in front of a jury, which is one of the most exhausting activities I know about, dashing up to the law library after court had adjourned to spend three or four hours looking up law points with which I could trap my adversary the next day, then going home, grabbing a glass of milk with an egg in it, dashing upstairs to my study, ripping the cover off my typewriter, noticing it was 11:30 p.m. and settling down with grim determination to get a plot for a story. Along about 3 in the morning I would have completed my daily stint of a 4,000-word minimum and would crawl into bed."“