The jarring of the telephone bell woke me. I had dozed off in the chair, which was a bad mistake, because I woke up with two flannel blankets in my mouth, a splitting headache, a bruise on the back of my head and another on my jaw, neither of them larger than a Yakima apple, but sore for all that. I felt terrible. I felt like an amputated leg.
– Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business
Sunday, October 15, 2006
How to write like a slumming angel
It was throwaway prose. Hacked out of a bent typewriter for pennies a paragraph. Destined for cheap paper, the floor next to the bed, the trash bin. Seventy years on, and I can't come even close.
4 comments:
Raymond Chandler is, like, SUCH a showoff.
this reminded me of just a little line a friend of mine gave me through an IM the other night and I ran with it and it's turned into a really good story.
I like your blog. :)
What I don't get is how Chandler was such a great writer in a field where great writing was very much not required, and yet not only did he manage to do it and sneak in under the radar (The Long Goodbye is literary fiction, and barely a detective novel at all), he never flexed his muscles to write anything more upmarket. Where is his unfinished magnum opus, or notes therefor? Even Cain wrote his Serenade, a real oddity. Chandler never did, except, as noted, indirectly.
Raymond Chandler is one of my favorite writers. I haunt the bookshelves hoping there is a book I just happened to overlook, but I read them all years ago.
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