Ha. Guess what author Margaret Mitchell thought of her epic 1936 novel.

Blog

Ha. Guess what author Margaret Mitchell thought of her epic 1936 novel.

February 9, 2017July 21, 2023 385

“Gone with the Wind,” color, 1939, happens to be starting on Turner Classic Movies as I write this article. I wondered what Margaret Mitchell, the author of the novel on which the movie was based, thought of the film so I did a little Google search.

According to Biography.com, Ms. Mitchell hated her ponderous thousand-page book. I did not know that. This is from the Bio website:

‘Gone With The Wind’

“Mitchell started writing the book that made her famous out of boredom as she recovered from a leg injury. She had to be goaded into showing it to an editor and was reluctant to have it published. She stated on several occasions that it was ‘a rotten book’ and that she hated the act of writing. Gone With The Wind would be her only novel. She received a Pulitzer Prize for the book in 1937, and it was adapted to film in 1939.”

Wow. Just wow. If she hated it so much, I’m frankly surprised, my dear, that she finished the damned thing. You win a hundred points if you know why I wrote that last sentence the way I did.

Socially, a journalist fits in somewhere between a whore and a bartender. But spiritually he stands beside Galileo. He knows the world is round.

Sherman Reilly Duffy

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.

Ernest Hemingway

If you wait for inspiration to write, you’re not a writer. You’re a waiter.

Dan Poynter

Stories are never too long or too short. They’re too interesting or too boring.

William Shawn

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.

Stephen King

When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: “House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1,500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”

Neil Gaiman

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate and infinitely better looking.

Chris Claremont

It is only natural to pattern yourself after someone. But you can’t just copy someone. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

Bob Dylan

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Victor Hugo

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Benchley

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote

Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

Elbert Hubbard

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

Stephen Wright

No writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.

Thomas Wolfe

I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.

J.K. Rowling