Thoughts on Writing
📖 Read Leonard’s reflections on writing
On Writing a Harris & Company
I posted an older story, a harris & company, because I wanted to write about how I work as a writer and this one was important because it was one of the ones that lead to the discovery of my voice.
First, I was in graduate school, an MFA Program at Bowling Green University in Ohio (which, by the way, is one state I prefer to fly over rather than drive through, but the program was helpful in that it gave me plenty of time to write since the teaching assistantship was not demanding, there were few other distractions apart from playing pinball with my esteemed colleagues like Jimmy Powell, Gordon Anderson (both of whom would later be my partners in the first year of the bookstore Intellectuals & Liars in LA), Joel Dailey, Randy Signor (both of whom would end up working at the store, though Randy’s contribution excelled all the others), and others too numerous to name. There was always breakfast afterwards at 2:30-3:00 in the morning when the bars closed and the pinball machines lay dormant. But I’m off topic here, as usual.
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Multi-Character Books
Periodically I go back to trying to write a book with several main characters and inter-connecting plots. This is something I first attempted in the early 1970s when I was writing politically-themed novels. The first was a book called Utopia Parkway-Exit 1/4 Mile which is a highway sign on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, NY. That version had four main characters and about the same number of supporting characters and three plot lines. I was never satisfied with it and later, using the same title, wrote a second book about a group of graduate students at a Midwestern college that used composite characters from my own MFA experience.
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RIZZO & Dog
Years ago, actually many years ago, I wrote what would become my first Rizzo book. It was called like a deuce, which was a reference to the Bruce Springsteen song Blinded By The Light. The lines went:
"He was just blinded by the light
cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night
blinded by the light
Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun
Oh, but Mama, that's where the fun is."
Springsteen was referring to a supped up car, like "a little deuce coup" to quote a Beach Boys' song, but I intended a double meaning. Rizzo just wasn't a sports car zooming around in the night but also a wild card, as in "deuces wild" in poker, so he was in essence unpredictable. He was my journalist protagonist who was too cocky for his own good.
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