Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors

by Celia Blue Johnson

Every great writer has a unique way of setting a story to paper. And, it turns out, many of these writers used methods that were just as inventive as the works they produced. Odd Type Writers explores the quirky writing habits of renowned authors, including Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and Alexandre Dumas, among many others.

* To meet his deadline for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo placed himself under strict house arrest, locking up all of his clothes and wearing nothing but a large gray shawl until he finished the book.

* Virginia Woolf used purple ink for love letters, diary entries, and to pen her acclaimed novel Mrs. Dalloway. Also, in her twenties, she preferred to write while standing up.

* Friedrich Schiller kept a drawer full of rotten apples in his study. According to his wife, he couldn’t work without that pungent odor wafting into his nose.

* Eudora Welty evaluated her work with scissors handy. If anything needed to be moved, she cut it right out of the page. Then she’d use pins to put the section in its new place.

In Odd Type Writers, you’ll find out why James Joyce wrote in crayon, what Edgar Allan Poe’s cat was doing on his shoulder, why Vladimir Nabokov had to keep his feet wet, and the other peculiar tools and eccentric methods used to compose some of the greatest works of all time.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Biography, Books About Books, Reference, Lifestyle

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 2013

About the author

Celia Blue Johnson began her publishing career as a book editor at Random House and Grand Central Publishing. She left editing to focus on writing and running Slice, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that has been featured in Time Out New York, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She has interviewed several bestselling and award-winning writers for Slice magazine. You can find out more about Slice by visiting www.slicemagazine.org.

Celia is the editor of two poetry anthologies, 100 Great Poems for Girls and 100 Poems to Lift Your Spirits. Her latest book, Dancing with Mrs. Dalloway, offers stories about the inspiration behind great works of literature. She is currently working on another book about famous writers and their quirky writing techniques.

Celia grew up in Melbourne, Australia. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.

Reviews

[Murat Dural · Rating 4 out of 5]

Son yılların en iyi çıkış yapan, edebiyata sermaye ve gönül veren Hep Kitap'ın "Yazmak Üzerine" şekillenen "Atölye" serisi çok hoşuma gidiyor. Bu sefer de naçizane yazma çabasında olan, okumayı seven biri olarak yazarların kendilerini rahat hissettikleri, alışkanlık haline getirdikleri davranışları işleyen bir kitabı dilimize kazandırmışlar. Altını çizdiğim çok yer oldu ama kitap bana bilmediğim çok az şey söyledi. Yazmakla ilgileniyorsanız kütüphanenizde olması gerçekten hoş olur ama daha fazlasını (misal doğaya çıkıp çırılçıplak, arabasının bagajını açıp orada yazabilen bir J. D. Salinger yok kitapta) bana veremedi.

[Andrew Edstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining, but not as useful as "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work" by Mason Currey. Read Currey's book first and then flip through "Odd Type Writers" if you're dying for more.

[Emma Sea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A marvelous light, frothy, enjoyable book. Easy to dip into to read a section when you have a spare moment. Excellent for reading over coffee.

[Shawn Bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was included in the first Writerly Kit, along with "The Compass Guidebook to Discoveries while reading" by Janet I. Whitehead. She had put little bookmarks all through Odd Type Writers that linked to commentary and questions about our own writing.

Odd Type Writers serves to inform us that writers have many quirks and diverse writing processes, so whatever works for us, is perfectly fine. All that's important is that one perseveres and does the writing.

[Kitty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was lots of fun and an easy read. I finished it in about 24 hours. It would be nice if there were more about writers of color- I think all I noticed was a short reference to Langston Hughes writing with green ink.

[Agape · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bu kitabı bir forumdaşın paylaşımıyla görüp almaya karar vermiştim. Pişman olmadım. Öyle çok fazla uçuk şeyler yok ama yazmak için yazarların tuhaf alışkanlıklarını okumak benim çok hoşuma gitti. Oldukça da ilgimi çeken ve benzerlikler bulduğum yazarlar vardı.

Kapaktaki isimlere baksanız yeter zaten. Mutlaka okuduğunuz, okumak istediğiniz veya hayran olduğunuz bir yazar içinde vardır. Kapakta göremedim ama bir de Ray Bradbury ve Asimov ile alakalı bazı bilgiler de var.

Yazarların yazmak için gösterdikleri çaba gerçekten bazı noktalarda takdire şayan. Disiplinleri, inatları beni etkiledi. Sadece tuhaf huylar olarak bakmamak lazım kitaba. Bazı noktalarda yaşadıklarını öğrenerek daha fazla hayran olabilir hatta belki bilmediğiniz bir yazarı da araştırarak okumak isteyebilirsiniz. Son yirmi sayfasında kaynakça yer alıyor. Bu bilgilerin nasıl edindiğini de merak ediyorsanız görmüş oluyorsunuz. Bulabilir misiniz orası tartışma konusu. :)

[ESMA YAGCI]

Luzumsuz bir kitap olmuş

[Lynnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading about rituals and idiosyncrasies of other writers. Informative and entertaining.

[CleverBaggins · Rating 2 out of 5]

So the premise of this book is the odd writing habits various authors had when writing. The tidbits on the back teased some amusingly odd but cute things and it starts promisingly. The author talked about finding and going inside an old speakeasy club that many famous writers had spent time in. It was well written, easy to read and interesting. The actual book is more like a series of essays than anything else and while I expected odd habits, what's really described seemed fairly obvious to me. Some writers preferred to write at night, some in the morning. Some in seclusion, or with their favorite drink or cherished pet.

It was interesting to read these small tales of which writers had which habits but it was nothing I would've called odd. Still, they were enjoyable and quick, easy reads. I'm not sure how to rate this book though. I read it fast, over the course of a handful of hours while doing other things, but about 3/4 of the way through it just seemed repetitive to me. I think she either needed to just write longer essays on one subject or shorten the book. Even more, I found I had a problem with the writers she chose. Specifically, ones I felt she left out and could've used to make things more interesting. She has an odd collection of writers, Hemingway to Dorothy Park to Collete and a couple I'd never heard of. She even mentions Stephen King once, but in writing about pets she never mentions Twain? Or when talking about trees or taking strolls she never mentions Tolkien?

While very through in some spots she's exceedingly bare in others, tossing off half a sentence about polydactyl cats but writing whole pages on a man's coffee drinking habits in Paris. I don't know. I was excited to bored all at once and was left slightly dissatisfied. Not sure I can necessarily recommend this one although it may be better for something to just pick up occasionally instead of sitting to read all at once.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the title more than the actual book, but these strange habits, routines and superstitions of famous writers were certainly entertaining.

Should I drink coffee like Balzac and Voltaire, or tea like Simone de Beauvoir and Samuel Johnson? Can I commit to 4,000 words a day like Asimov, or is Graham Greene’s 500 words more my speed?

I found the following pair of scissors-related practices particularly interesting.

James Joyce called himself a “scissors and paste man.” (For me, that quote alone made the book worthwhile.) He found words and phrases, cut them out and stored them in notebooks and then later used colored pencil and crayon notations to indicate the ones he used in his manuscripts. “Valerie Larbaud wrote about Joyce’s Ulysses notebooks: ‘It makes one think of the boxes of little coloured cubes of the mosaic workers.’”

Eudora Welty used her scissors for revision, cutting out the parts of her typed draft that seemed out of place and using pins to stick them somewhere else within her manuscript. She said the idea came from making dresses with paper patterns. A “fitting” comparison, I’d say.

[Susan Oleksiw · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admit that I'm a sucker for books about writers, from the shallowest collection of pithy sayings to the longest biographies vying for the Pulitzer Prize. This one falls closer to the former than the latter end of the spectrum, but it is fun as well as giving readers, especially other writers, things to ponder. Johnson gives a separate short chapter to twenty writers but discusses those and others in chapters on general topics such as nightlife and drinking. Some writers could only work with a certain ink or paper, others had to place their writing materials in a certain way. The pleasure to be derived from these vignettes is like peeking through a window at an old friend to see him or her coming to the door to greet you.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and sometimes entertaining collection of essays about well-known writers and there habits, rituals, quirks, superstitions, obsessions, muses, and more.

[Craig Cottongim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read it the same day I got it. It far exceeded my expectations. It was more interesting than I anticipated. I thoroughly enjoyed it!

[El]

Wharton!

Also this.

[Isil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Etkileyici ancak sanki internette var olan bilgiler derlenmiş toplanmış gibi. Gözler Fitzgeral, Salinger ve Kafka gibi yazarları da arıyor, bulamıyor.

[Don Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just a fun quick book to read about writers and their quirky habits.

[Marilyn]

Chapters on:
Honore de Balzac
Alexandre Dumas
Victor Hugo
Edgar Allen Poe
Charles Dickens

Edith Wharton 1862-1937; "True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own." from The Writing of Fiction;
"Edith Wharton's dream home was a mansion seated on top of a hill in Lenox, Massachusetts." from Odd Type Writers

Marcel Proust
Gertrude Stein
Jack London
Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
D. H. Lawrence
Vladimir Nabokov
Ernest Hemingway
John Steinbeck
Eudora Welty
Truman Capote
Flannery O'Connor

[Suellen Rubira · Rating 3 out of 5]

os hábitos de escrita de vários autores estão reunidos nesse livro. flannery o'conner escrevia de cara virada para um armário de madeira. hemmingway e steinbeck também fugiam de qualquer pista da "vida lá fora" e encaravam as paredes enquanto escreviam. capote, por seu turno, produzia seus textos bem deitadão na cama, fumando uns cigarros, bebendo café, chá ou martini.

acho que, mais importante do que mapear a rotina de trabalho dos escritores, esses relatos mostram que escritores, que surpresa!, são seres humanos e aquilo o que encaramos como "excentricidade" nada mais é do que ser uma pessoa comum, mesmo quando produzindo obras extraordinárias.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short chapters and interesting tidbits made this book a fun vacation read. While it never goes especially in-depth, it's written in a captivating way that points out fun connections and reflections about a handful of well-known writers. (Most are names you'd recognize from English class - not a very wide-reaching pool, but authors that are interesting to see in a different light by peeking into their process.) Ultimately it's got me thinking about my own habits and daydreaming about holing up in a beach house or a bathtub or the attic of a Parisian apartment and putting pen to paper.

[A.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess the big takeaway from this is… what is not odd, or what is normal?
It’s a series of short chapters, one for each personal habit, divided into sections by type of habit: early riser, late stayer, location, by the numbers, index cards, colour, scissors and so on.
Sylvia Plath wins with the earliest riser - 4am.
It’s the kind of book that is perfect for a library, which is where I found it.
3 stars

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Celia Blue Johnson's book is a delight of anecdotes about the lives of famous writers. There is plenty here to entertain. I've even used elements in the writing classes I teach to remind new writers that even the literary greats had quirks and blocks and bad habits.

If you like books about writers, you'll find this one delightful. It's not as meaty as some (_Page Fright_ comes to mind), but it's a charmer.

[Davide · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found it very interesting to read this book and I also admired the whole work behind it, it’s huge. Very easy to read and entertaining. Perfect if you wanna have a soft reading and learn facts about great authors at the same time.

[Elissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully written collection of essays about the greatest authors, Odd Type Writers was an interesting and delightful read. Both the content and style with which this book is crafted intrigue the reader and pull them in on a wonderful journey of discovery!

[Dian Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful read and great to learn about the habits of some interesting authors. There are lots of laughable moments but most just show the dedication that these great minds put toward achieving their best works.

[lqmzjjx · Rating 3 out of 5]

中文版《怪作家：从席勒的烂苹果到奥康纳的甜牙》，网上可下的都是PDF，对kindle而言阅读体验有些下降。

标题写怪作家 与其说他们是怪人狠人，不如说是妙人。巴尔扎克的咖啡，爱伦坡的猫都众所周知，而让我羡慕的则是伊迪斯.华顿。这位女作家亲手打造了一座名为“山峰”的华美府邸，且拥有一个精美的花园，临着一片名为月桂湖的水域。她穿着丝质的睡衣，坐在玫瑰色床罩底下，用浅蓝色信纸写作。我不禁对这位我从未听说的作家产生好奇，猜测她的作品会是怎样的风格呢？

有趣的还有海明威，有人问他成为作家首先要做什么，老爷子认真回答“先给冰箱除霜”，哈哈。

最后，感谢文学家们，让这个人间更美好多彩。

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look into how some writers set up shop. Reads like a selection of snippets.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I live for this! Happy birthday to me!

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting insight into the habits of writers.

[Kirsty Keddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little bit U.S. centric in her choice of authors but great fun to read about the quirks and get an insight into the hard work and habits that created some of our great novels :-)

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

比较流水账地讲了讲知名作家们的各种不寻常的、与写作直接或间接相关的习惯：大仲马的三色纸、奥康纳的孔雀、伍尔夫的紫色墨水和有斜面的桌子、很多作家的猫；有人半夜写、有人清早写、有人坐在浴缸里写。译文里有很多太直译的地方（和疑似的低级错误），比如“被许可进入一所医院”怕不是“was admitted to a hospital”……