Wednesday Writing Wisdom (25) Honore de Balzac

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.”

    Honore de Balzac
         (1799 - 1850) 
               Curious facts about:
 

 At the age of 8, Balzac was sent to boarding school. He was an undisciplined child. and he was often sent to detention, or ''kept in." He looked on this punishment as a blessing in disguise because it gave him time for reading.

Think you’re addicted to coffee? Chances are your caffeine problem doesn’t even come close to that of  Honore de Balzac. He consumed as many as 50 cups of coffee each day, barely sleeping at all while composing his magnum opus, La Comedie Humaine. 
 
Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, maybe due to his intense writing schedule. By writing as much as 16 hours a day, Balzac published over 80 titles between 1829 and 1847.

 His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marie Corelli, William Faulkner, Henry James, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino

Wednesday Writing Wisdom (24) Frank Herbert

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”

Frank Herbert

       (1920-1986 )

Curious facts about: 

Well known as a short story writer and as a professional photographer, he studied such diverse subjects as undersea geology, marine architecture, navigation, semantics, psychology, jungle botany, and oriental religions.

 During the Second World War he was an accredited photographer with the U.S. Navy, and he has also worked as a newspaperman, oyster-diver, judo instructor, TV cameraman, radio news commentator, jungle survival instructor, and lay analyst.

 Herbert's first published SF work was in 1952 for Startling Stories entitled "Looking for Something." The major career break for Frank came after John Campbell serialized Dune in 1963-4 for the new Analog. Two more Dune books followed, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune creating a Dune Trilogy. Some years later, three more Dune books were added.


 He and his wife had three children, one of whom, Brian Herbert, became a SF writer in his own right.

Wednesday Writing Wisdom (14) Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne
  (1804 - 1864)

Curious facts about:

He changed his last name in part to hide his family’s dark past. The novelist’s great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was a leading judge of the Salem witch trials, and Hawthorne was haunted by his ancestor’s shameful past. Shortly after graduating from Bowdoin, the author added a “w” to his last name in part to make the spelling match the pronunciation and also to disassociate himself from a figure of whom he wrote was “so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him.”

When “The Scarlet Letter” was published in the spring of 1850, the initial print run of 2,500 copies sold out in only 10 days. However, given the publicity that had surrounded Hawthorne’s firing the year before, readers were initially less interested in the tale of Hester Prynne than they were in the novel’s introduction, “The Custom-House,” in which Hawthorne’s barbed pen skewered his political enemies.

With the author’s health failing in the spring of 1864 as a likely result of gastrointestinal cancer, Hawthorne’s old college friend, former president Franklin Pierce traveled with him to New Hampshire’s White Mountains with the hope that the region’s rarified air could be an elixir. On the evening of May 18 inside the Pemigewasset House hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Hawthorne retired early after a dinner of toast and tea. During the night, Pierce awoke to check on his friend in the adjoining room. The former president placed his hand upon Hawthorne’s forehead and found that he was dead. Pierce’s presence fulfilled a passage in Hawthorne’s novel “The Blithedale Romance”: “Happy the man that has such a friend beside him, when he comes to die!”