The Verb is an e-magazine for writers that I have been reading regularly for many years. The Verb is edited by Elizabeth Guy and published by Reading Writers.
I enjoy The Verb’s fresh crisp style. There is not a single word out-of-place or extra and each sentence takes you a step forward. This magazine is full of interesting information and anecdotes for and about writers, a contest or two to keep those creative juices flowing and some friendly tips as well. The September 2010 issue of The Verb is no exception. And I am taking the liberty of copy pasting a portion here that I especially loved. This is from their “A Moment in the History of Writing” column:
In 1959 a struggling writer, who seriously considered giving up the writing life, joined her family for a cross-country camping trip. On this trip, an idea struck her, and it wouldn’t go away.
Ten weeks later, when she returned to her home in Connecticut, she sat down to write the story. She began with a deliberate old chestnut from 19th century novelist, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, It was a dark and stormy night, because she realized the importance of getting the reader’s attention.
“Every one of Shakespeare’s plays starts with an attention-getter. Otherwise, the audience would throw rotten fruit. I get my own attention first. If it doesn’t grab me, it’s not going to grab the reader.”
Feeling a strong kinship with Einstein, she added concepts she had plucked from his theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory. She also broke a taboo of the time: she made the protagonist female.
By 1960, the book was finished, and she was ecstatic. “I knew it was a good book when I finished it. I knew it was the best thing I’d ever done.”
But it was a book nobody wanted.
When she checked her mailbox, she found nothing but rejection letters. More than two dozen of them. No one knew what to do with the book, or what sort of audience it targeted.
After two and a half years of hitting the wall, she finally met John Farrar of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. But unlike the other publishers, he loved what he read and wasted no time snatching up the manuscript. It was published in 1962.
The book nobody wanted was A Wrinkle in Time, and it proved to be Madeleine L’Engle’s masterpiece. It won the John Newbery Medal as the best children’s book of 1963 and, now in its 69th printing, has sold over eight million copies.
“I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him,” she said. “I know that is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”








