by PBS
Some critics took umbrage with what they perceived to be a misogynistic undertone throughout the books. Christian’s sexual satisfaction hinges upon his ability to dominate his female partners, known as submissives, taking away their agency and their choice. However, as the books’ fans point out, Ana chooses to be involved with Christian, and he adapts some of his behaviors per her request. The series has been credited with broadening the conversation about sexuality and the wide range of possibilities for pleasure between consenting adults.
Jack London, writing outside in 1905. London aimed to write 1,000 words a day.
“When It Is Finished, You Are Always Surprised”
WRITERS’ DAILY HABITS & RITUALS
WE ALL HAVE 24 HOURS IN A DAY, and some people use their allowance of time on earth to create masterpieces. But finding that time never comes easy, no matter who you are or how many novels you might have to your name. As J. K. Rowling once remarked, “Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.”
Some writers wake up early to work. Toni Morrison cultivated the habit of rising before dawn, while balancing her job as an editor at Random House with raising her sons as a single parent and her literary endeavors. She found that she was “clearer-headed, more confident, and generally more intelligent in the morning.” George Orwell, in contrast, wrote late into the night.
Another trick is to set a daily writing goal. That habit worked for Jack London, who aimed for 1,000 words a day, regardless of how he felt or where he was living. Mark Twain tried for a little more, usually while lying in bed, and Stephen King shoots for 10 pages a day, or about 2,000 words. “On some days those ten pages come easily,” he notes in his memoir, On Writing. “I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the words come hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.”
Charles Dickens took long walks around London to spur his creative juices. Joseph Heller liked to write in his head while riding the bus or brushing his teeth, generating ideas for the next day’s pages. Ayn Rand took speed. F. Scott Fitzgerald drank and smoked—and died from alcohol-related causes at age 44.
While it’s great to have isolation and privacy, as Leo Tolstoy required, some writers compose with company, either by desire or by necessity. Jane Austen would write while her mother and sister sewed nearby, switching the writing for sewing of her own when visitors arrived. Agatha Christie would plop her typewriter on any handy table.
Lewis Carroll liked to write standing up. When he gets stuck, Dan Brown goes upside down, using an inversion-therapy table to break through writer’s block. Brown also keeps an hourglass on his desk and stops to do calisthenics every hour. Kurt Vonnegut said, “I do pushups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not.” Perhaps that was due to the “several belts of Scotch and water” he’d use to calm his “twanging intellect” at the end of each day.
However the writing gets on the page, writers have to be willing to toss whatever isn’t working. In a letter, Ernest Hemingway explained that he “write[s] one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
Whatever their unique habits and daily routines, all successful writers have one thing in common: they write. John Steinbeck advised to “abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day; it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.” E. B. White likewise recommended a can-do attitude: “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”
The cover of the first edition of Flowers in the Attic, published in 1979.
A photo of author V. C. Andrews. Andrews wrote in secret, and completed 20 short stories and 9 novels in 7 years.
An updated book cover released in 2014, to tie in with a Lifetime movie release.
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FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC
V. C. Andrews · 1979
Our homes are our sanctuaries, where we go after a long day, where we can be most ourselves, where we shrug off our burdens and relax. There is the outside world, with its challenges and difficulties, and there is the inside world, cozy and cocooned. No home is more safe and secure than the one in which we spent our childhood, or the one where we choose to raise our family. V. C. Andrews takes these comfortable, familiar notions, and utterly upends them with her horror novel Flowers in the Attic (1979).
There’s incest, child abuse, rape, and literal skeletons hidden by wealthy families—it’s a soap opera you can read, with taboos and creepiness on every page. And readers love it.
After the death of her husband in 1957, Corrine Dollanganger returns to her ancestral family home in Virginia, along with her four children: 14-year-old Chris, 12-year-old Cathy, and 5-year-old twins Cory and Carrie. She has been estranged from her parents, Olivia and Malcolm Foxworth, for many years. When the family arrives at the big house, the four children are sent into the attic, where they’ll spend the next several years being abused by their grandmother and slowly poisoned with arsenic-sprinkled doughnuts. Their grandfather cannot learn of their existence, or so they are told, in order for Corrine to receive her inheritance upon his death. Chris and Cathy try to make the time as pleasant as possible for their siblings, who become sick and stunted. Taking on parental roles while in the throes of puberty, the older siblings develop sexual and romantic feelings for each other.
Flowers in the Attic ticks every box in the gothic-literature playbook: a huge creepy house; a sense of foreboding and doom; secrets and sins that affect and afflict the innocent. It explores the ways in which repression might drive a person to do horrible things or even go insane, while demonstrating the inescapability of the past. Chris and Cathy aren’t the first generation to commit incest; as we learn in subsequent books, Corrine and her husband were half-brother and -sister. Many characters endure sexual violence, including Cathy’s rape by her mother’s new husband. The melodrama drives the plot, shocking readers with the depth of depravity in the Dollanganger-Foxworth families. You can’t look, but you can’t look away either.
In selecting the name Cathy for her heroine, Andrews clearly signals her book’s connection to another novel about horrors committed in the name of family: Wuthering Heights (1847). While Cathy and Chris truly seem to love one another, no reader could happily call Flowers in the Attic or its sequels a romance. That could be said for Wuthering Heights as well: in recollecting the love between Catherine and her adopted brother, Heathcliff, readers sometimes forget the depths of despair and violence the characters inflict upon one another.
Born Cleo Virginia Andrews in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1923, Andrews suffered from crippling rheumatoid arthritis and endured multiple back surgeries beginning in her early teens. She spent the majority of her life in a wheelchair or on crutches. After graduating from high school, she took an art correspondence course, and eventually supported her mother with the money she made doing fashion illustrations and commercial work. She wrote on the side, in secret, completing 20 short stories and nine novels in seven years before finding success with Flowers in the Attic.
The Dollanganger series continues to track Cathy and Chris as they attempt to overcome their awful past, separately and together. Cathy, in particular, wants revenge on Corrine at any cost. A later book, Garden of Shadows (1986), helps explain the awfulness that transformed Olivia from an insecure young woman into an evangelical monster. To date, two movies have been made from Flowers in the Attic: one
in 1987, and another in 2014. A ghostwriter handpicked by the Andrews estate after her death in 1986 carries on the tradition of sweeping, twisted tales.
A 2004 hardcover edition dust jacket of Foundation.
Author Isaac Asimov, circa 1965. Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books throughout his lifetime.
The Foundation series was first published in stories that appeared in Astounding magazine. Copies here are from 1942.
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FOUNDATION SERIES
Isaac Asimov · 1951–1993
If you’re trying to explain the term polymath, you would do well to use the example of Isaac Asimov. Over the course of his lifetime, the bespectacled, mutton-chopped figure wrote or edited more than 500 books, including both science textbooks and science fiction. As he would explain to those who asked, he managed to stay so prolific in part by jotting down “every idea [he’s] ever had.”
Starting in 1942, inspired by Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789), Asimov conceived of the Galactic Empire in a series of short stories; these were later published as Foundation (1951), the first novel in the Foundation series. He published two more novels in rapid succession, Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953), then took a 30-year break. He picked up where he left off, at the request of his publisher, with two more sequels, Foundation’s Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), and wrote two prequels, Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1993, published posthumously) before his death in 1992. At the outset of the series, Asimov was just beginning to be noticed as a writer; by the conclusion, he was widely recognized as perhaps the greatest sci-fi writer to ever pick up a pen.
Isaac Asimov was born in 1920 in Russia. His family emigrated in 1923, to settle in New York City. His parents ran a candy store in Brooklyn. As a child, he would convince his mother and father that the pulpy sci-fi magazines he read were educational because they had “science” in their titles. Ruse aside, he loved learning. He earned a PhD in biochemistry from Columbia, taught that subject at the college level, and read widely and deeply his entire life.
Bursting with high concepts, the Foundation books trace the work of the character Hari Seldon. A brilliant thinker, Seldon invents psychohistory, a mathematical sociological model that can predict and shape the collective behavior of humans over a very, very long span of time. While Seldon cannot foresee the behavior of any one individual, his system demonstrates that the Galactic Empire is doomed to fail, at which point chaos and mayhem will descend for thousands of years, and then a second empire will rise. As he analyzes his data and its patterns, he also realizes that this terrible period could be significantly shortened via the launch of a Foundation composed of talented, capable people who will serve as the basis of the subsequent empire. Seldon forms a secret second Foundation too. Separate books cover other characters and periods, with unique plots—but in each one, math, science, and social science save the day again and again.
Readers searching for extraterrestrials, epic battles, and innovative technology might want to look elsewhere. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman noted in a 2012 paean to the novels, “After all, the Foundation novels aren’t really about the galaxy, or even about space travel. They’re about the true final frontier—understanding ourselves, and the societies we make.” In particular, the books explore how close we can get to a full scientific understanding of human communities and how this effort might allow us to bend history in beneficial directions.
In 1966, the Foundation series won a special Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series, beating out J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954–1955). Of course, it might take some readers as long to get through the seven original books, plus the more recent books in the series approved by his estate, as it took Asimov to write them. It’s a reading project worth the effort, though, as the Foundation books testify to an amazing mind with singular powers of creativity.
The 1831 edition of Frankenstein, revised and updated with a foreword by Mary Shelley.
The title page from the same volume.
A portrait of author Mary Shelley. She was inspired to write Frankenstein as part of a challenge issued by Lord Byron.
Shelley wrote the first pages of Frankenstein while on holiday with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others at the Villa Diodati, in Geneva, Switzerland.
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FRANKENSTEIN
Mary Shelley · 1818
Mary Godwin was just 16 when she ran off with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and just 18 when she dreamed up the world’s most famous monster. In doing so, she not only launched thousands of horror stories but essentially invented science fiction as a literary genre.
Frankenstein began with a challenge. Godwin and Shelley arrived on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816 expecting a frolicsome summer with their friend Lord Byron. Instead, it was unseasonably cold. To pass the dreary days, Byron asked everyone to come up with a ghost story. Mary longed to create a tale “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” Initially, perhaps suffering from the pressure of trying to perform for her lover and his well-known friend, she got a case of writer’s block.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in London in 1797, the daughter of anarchist philosopher William Godwin and feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who died soon after the birth. As a teen Mary Godwin would read at her mother’s grave, eventually having secret meetings there with Shelley, a disciple of her father, although Shelley already had a wife and a child on the way.
According to its author, the idea for Frankenstein arrived in a waking dream a few days into Byron’s contest, but the truth might have been far sadder. In an 1815 diary entry, Mary describes her profound grief at the sudden death of her infant daughter, and her longing to return the baby to life. At any rate, she spent a night at Byron’s villa alternately dreaming and thinking about a scientist who creates a monster—and she won Byron’s storytelling contest hands down.
The 1818 publication of Frankenstein was a ray of sunshine in Mary Shelley’s otherwise-grim existence. Two more children died in infancy. A beloved sister committed suicide. Percy had multiple affairs, possibly with her stepsister. The Shelleys traveled almost constantly to avoid creditors. Mary and Percy had married in 1816, but then he drowned in 1822. The resulting unhappiness, alienation, and loneliness of widowhood inform the book, which went through a significant revision in 1831—and it’s this version that we now read. At this point, too, Shelley added a preface that explains the story’s genesis, an effort to correct rumors that her husband helped write it.
Captain Robert Walton encounters Victor Frankenstein in a barren, icy world. As he nurses Frankenstein back to health, he hears about the young scientist’s childhood and early experiments seeking to animate dead creatures. Using corpses and slaughtered animals, he fashions a creature, but the result shocks and scares him, and he flees. A string of murders follows the scientist, who is convinced that his monster is the cause. In the mountains, Frankenstein meets the monster, who eloquently pleads for a companion to combat his isolation. The doctor agrees, then becomes increasingly horrified as the monster murders again and again, including taking the life of the doctor’s fiancée. Frankenstein vows to spend the remainder of his days enacting revenge.
Aside from the three Boris Karloff movies and countless other appearances in pop culture over the past 200 years, Frankenstein treads some heady waters. The novel features a complex structure, stories within letters within narratives told by different people; this frame-within-a-frame arrangement was popular in the 19th century but can be challenging to follow. It’s a novel of ideas, asking vast, thorny questions about science, ethics, and psychology. Who gets to play God? What is the price of knowledge? What do we owe those we usher into the world?
These questions resonate in the 21st century, whe
n advanced technologies like stem-cell research and cloning bring us closer and closer to the possibility Shelley so compellingly imagined.
A hardcover dust jacket of Ghost, first published in 2016.
Author Jason Reynolds. Reynolds works to create relatable characters in his novels, in part because the lack of them turned him off from reading when he was young.
Reynolds talks with author Daniel José Older in Washington, DC, in 2016.
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GHOST
Jason Reynolds · 2016
It’s a true story that would make a great novel: growing up, Jason Reynolds hated to read. He couldn’t stand the books he was given in school, partly because they concerned characters who were nothing like he was—young, black, being raised by a single mom in a tough suburb outside of Washington, DC. Shortly before he turned 18, he discovered Black Boy, Richard Wright’s 1945 memoir of an impish child who escaped the Jim Crow South to become a successful writer, and Reynolds was hooked. He went on to major in English at the University of Maryland. Now he’s a bestselling, award-winning writer, publishing eight books in three years, with his first novel being made into a movie and a seven-figure deal for another four, more than making up for lost time.