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Mark Twain

Patreon Preview: J. Michael Straczynski

Note: This is a preview of “The Write Place with J. Michael Straczynski”, my previously unpublished 8,700-word interview with J. Michael Straczynski. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $10 “Fresh copy!” level.

“The best part of it is knowing that it wasn’t due to personality, lord knows,” said J. Michael Straczynski of his writing success. “It was due to making black marks on a piece of paper. Over and over again. For thirty or forty years. Somewhere along the line, you learn something. That’s how you become a writer. You sit down at a keyboard, and ten years after, when you stand up again, you’re a writer.”

“They’re exquisitely arranged black marks,” I said. “They’re not just tossed out there.”

“One certainly hopes so,” said Straczynski.

This career-spanning interview from 2008 focuses on the craft of writing in general, but makes reference to the challenges of showrunning Babylon 5 (1993–8), the frustrations of Crusade (1999) and Jeremiah (2002–4), as well as Straczynski’s success with Changeling (2008) and the difficulties he faced in adapting World War Z (2013) and the unproduced They Marched Into Sunlight.

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer

“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” by Mark Twain

Photo by Ernest H. Mills.

I have not read as much of Mark Twain’s œuvre as I should, A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT when I first dove into Arthurian mythology, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN in school, “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” at the behest of a friend, and others here and there.

But my favorite of Mr. Clemens’s works—thus far, at least—is:

“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offesnes,” which opens thus:

It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.

2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.

You can read the rest here: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/3172