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Douglas Adams hated to write, but he loved to have written

2021-04-20T04:58:18.719Z


The discovery of some notes by the writer on the tortuousness of the creative act illuminates a misunderstood paradox. Shouldn't someone who writes hilarious things have a great time?


Fredric Brown was a science fiction writer. One of the funniest sci-fi writers ever. He was born in Cincinnati in 1906. He could not devote himself to writing full time until almost the end. He was a proofreader. His sense of humor was a postmodern sense of humor, it was said. Partly because his stories weren't mere science fiction stories. They laughed at the very idea that there was something as ridiculous as human beings inhabiting some kind of world. In his most famous novel, a bored sci-fi writer recently dumped by his girlfriend opens the door to his apartment, wearing the girl's hoodie, thinking what the heck, wouldn't it be wonderful if the other side didn't would there be a door-to-door salesman but a Martian? And, tachán, it is with a Martian that he meets.

His most famous novel is entitled

Marciano, go home

and Luke Deveraux and his "wild red hair", the science fiction writer who stars in it, must face, like the rest of earthlings, the invasion of millions of ridiculous little green men that sneak into every house and begin to criticize everything: from the color of the curtains to the way you make love with your partner. It is a classic of absurd humor, in many ways metaliterary. The writer is a clear

alter ego

of Brown himself, a guy who drank too much and hated to write. How? Did you hate writing? Is something like this possible in a writer who makes the person who reads it have a great time? Oh sure, answer from the preface to

Lost Paradox

, one of his collections of short stories, his wife, Elizabeth Brown: “Fred hated to write. But I loved writing. "

Brown “did everything he could think of to put off sitting at the typewriter: he dusted the desk, he played the flute, he read for a while, he played the flute a little more. If we lived in a town where mail was not delivered, I would fetch it from the post office and then find someone with whom to play one — or two or three — games of chess or cards. When I came home I thought it was too late to start. After doing the same thing for several days, his conscience began to prickle and he would actually sit at the typewriter, ”says Elizabeth Brown. He also remembers that he hated being interrupted when he walked around the house saying things to himself, elaborating and reworking arguments: "I advised him to wear a red cap when he did not want to be disturbed."

There is an endless collection of non-humorous novel and short story writers who tend to speak of the writing process as small, sometimes huge, torture. But there are no great examples to the contrary, that is, of guys like Brown, who seemed to have a great time writing, saying that none of this had been fun at all. Except, not too long ago, for Brown himself (and great). But the opening of the 67 boxes in the archive of Douglas Adams, the author of the famous

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

, one of the most hilarious novels in history - and a tribute to the even funnier

Dimension of Miracles

, by the teacher Robert Sheckley - has found a handful of pages that the writer dedicated to himself trying not to lose heart in trying to create all that fun.

Douglas Adams' note to himself found in one of the 67 boxes in his archive, located at St John's College, Cambridge.St John's College / PA

"Writing was torture for him," said his sister, Jane Thrift, when asked if really all those notes in which Adams reminded himself that "whatever happened, that would end at some point", and also, that " writing is fine if you are the one attacking, if you don't let - whatever you are creating - attack you ”, they had some truth.

Couldn't the author of the holistic adventures of Dirk Gently, the detective for whom everything always turns out well, no matter how the world around him is becoming more and more absurdly stupid,

joking

?

“Today I am particularly fed up with the very idea of ​​writing.

Although I have not written for two days and that also torments me ”, he writes, in one of the many notes that he seemed to send to himself.

In some, he pretended to chat with a dragon named Lionel.

A good part of them will be part of a book that will be self-financed and that, of course, will have the title

42

, which is the answer given to the meaning of life, the universe and everything else in his famous tetralogy in five parts , the one that opens the

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

. The volume is intended to be the closest thing to diving in his head that could exist, because in those 67 boxes they have been found from future plots for his Dirk Gently series to an idea for an attraction at the Chessington World of Adventures amusement park in which He was working when a disastrous visit to the gym - his first - killed him at age 49. He also says horrible things about his characters. He calls everyone "idiots." He also considers his novels "idiotic". Writing funny novels doesn't have to be funny at all.

John Kennedy Toole himself, author of the classic

The Fool's Plot

, the guy who drowned in carbon monoxide in his own car, fed up with corresponding with an editor who didn't see the meaning of his novel, went through a real martyrdom while wrote. The infinite corrections that the publisher of Simon & Schuster (the label that took an interest in her before she finally threw in the towel), the historic Robert Gottlieb, asked of her only plunged her deeper and deeper into the tragedy of having written something that it seemed to make no sense. “What I was saying was that, while

Trap 22

he had a plot, his novel seemed like nothing at all, "recalls Gottlieb. Today it remains one of the best-selling books of all time and one of the best novels ever written. In this regard, Joseph Heller also had to deal with the correctors of

Trap 22

.

The novel, which spent years wandering from office to office, is the fieryly brilliant and hilarious account of what Heller himself experienced as a pilot during World War II, but it looks so absurdly farcical that it was feared for everything. However, his example is that of someone who does not have to have enjoyed the process - although it is likely that given what was behind it was not entirely pleasant - but rather the difficulty of his fit in a world that takes too seriously himself. Kurt Vonnegut, however, had to send himself notes like the ones Douglas Adams sent himself. It took 20 years to write

Matadero 5

. He came to have a thousand pages of the novel and told himself that nothing would ever make sense. But he did. It always does. Although it is not as fun as it sounds.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-04-20

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