How the late Clive Cussler got himself a literary agent.

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How the late Clive Cussler got himself a literary agent.

February 27, 2020July 21, 2023 726

Adventure novelist Clive Cussler died February 24th. He was 88.

The Washington Post’s Hillel Italie wrote an obituary, which appeared on February 26th.

We all know how hard it can be to get published. Mr. Cussler, being a novelist, found a novel way to get a literary agent. Mr. Italie wrote:

Mr. Cussler finished manuscripts for “The Mediterranean Caper” and “Iceberg” but had no literary agent: So he created one. He purchased a thousand sheets of blank letter paper, got a friend in advertising to design a logo for “The Charles Winthrop Agency” and sent his first inquiry to Peter Lampack of the William Morris Agency. Lampack agreed to take on Mr. Cussler and remained with him long after the author confessed his charade.

“I told him the story of Charlie Winthrop with great trepidation,” Mr. Cussler explained to the Arizona Republic. “I sat there waiting for the result, and he sat there blank for a minute, and then he laughed himself under the table. And he said, ‘Oh my God. I always thought Charlie Winthrop was some guy I met while I was drunk at a cocktail party.’ ”

Mr. Lampack wasn’t the only one who laughed himself under the table!

Here’s the original article.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any.

Orson Scott Card

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

Critics are people who sit on the mountaintop and look down on the battlefield. When the fighting is finished, they take it upon themselves to come down from the mountain and shoot the survivors.

Robert Altman

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the Internet.

Zadie Smith

If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.

William C. Gault

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

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 is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

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

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Mark Twain

Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.

Alice Munro

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Anton Chekhov

The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home.

John Campbell

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

Robert A. Heinlein

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

Stan Lee

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

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Oscar Wilde