Bonus Features: Fun Stuff about Books and Writing
Classic Starts
Who doesn’t love a good opening to a book? Here are a dozen from classic children’s books. See if you can match the opening to the book title.
Here are the titles, all mixed-up, if you want some help.
Answers: 1d, 2j, 3k, 4e, 5g, 6f, 7a, 8l, 9b, 10c, 11i, 12h
Who doesn’t love a good opening to a book? Here are a dozen from classic children’s books. See if you can match the opening to the book title.
- They were expecting me.
- This journey took place in a part of Canada which lies in the northwestern part of the great sprawling province of Ontario.
- Today, Monday, Wanda Petronski was not in her seat.
- Garnet thought this must be the hottest day that had ever been in the world. Every day for weeks she had thought the same thing, but this was really the worst of all.
- Sunday afternoon was clear, and the snow-covered prairie sparkled in the sunshine.
- The notes were appearing everywhere. Everyone was talking about it.
- The way Mama could peel apples! A few turns of the knife and there the apple was, all skinned!
- We moved on the Tuesday before Labor Day. I knew what the weather was like the second I got up. I knew because I caught my mother sniffing under her arms.
- One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from.
- [Main Character] was in a hurry. As she ran down Tillamook Street with her ballet slippers tucked under her arm, she did not even stop to scuff through the autumn leaves on the sidewalk.
- It was May, 1918, that a new friend and companion came into my life, a character, a personality, and a ring-tailed wonder.
- My name is [Main Character]. I live in a pad on Bleecker Street with Hugh and Marcia.
Here are the titles, all mixed-up, if you want some help.
- The Moffats, Eleanor Estes
- The Boxcar Children, Gertrude Chandler Warner
- Ellen Tebbits, Beverly Cleary
- Eloise in Moscow, Kay Thompson
- Thimble Summer, Elizabeth Enright
- The Long Secret, Louise Fitzhugh
- These Happy Golden Years, Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Suzuki Beane, Sandra Scoppetone
- Rascal, Sterling North
- The Incredible Journey, Sheila Burnford
- The Hundred Dresses, Eleanor Estes
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
Answers: 1d, 2j, 3k, 4e, 5g, 6f, 7a, 8l, 9b, 10c, 11i, 12h
How Writing Happens: the Best Explanation Ever
(From Dan Wakefield’s New York in the Fifties, describing a talk given at Columbia University in the 50s by Carson McCullers)
"McCullers…said she thought she’d just talk a little bit about writing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. This was mainly a graduate school audience, and there was a scholarly rustle and rush as notebooks and pens and pencils were whipped out, ready to trap the words, capture the secret.
I sat transfixed as McCullers told how she was writing the novel while living at home with her parents (she was nineteen years old at the time). She said there was a point at which she had written a number of pages, had all the characters, even had constructed some scenes, yet she didn’t see the story yet. She wrote in her own room, but when she came to a stopping place, or felt stuck, she would go out to the living room.
'We had a checked rug on the living room floor,' she said in her soft drawl, 'and I used to hop from one check to the next, like you do on a checked rug, while I was trying to think. Well, one day I hopped to this check, and I suddenly thought, My main character, his name isn’t Minowitz, his name is Singer. And he is deaf, and that’s why all these people are talkin’ to him.' McCullers smiled and said, 'And then I just wrote the book.'
Goose bumps went up my arms. It was like hearing magic explained that can’t be explained, but nonetheless the magician has told you as much as she knows, the way she knows it. During the question period, I cringed as a young man in the grad school uniform of horn-rims and corduroy jacket with elbow patches stood up and said something like, 'Mrs. McCullers, in your discussion of the creative process in regard to your novel, you referred to the point of illumination at which you perceived the plot or structure of the work while you were in your parents’ living room. Would you please expand on that, in regard to the illuminative experience and its role in the creative process?'
There was a slight pause, and then McCullers smiled and said, 'Well, like I said, I just hopped to that check!'
A burst of laughter broke over the room, followed by applause. The 'lecture' was over."