Tag Archives: Middlemarch

How to Write a Memoir or Novel According to Shakespeare – And 4 Other Famous Artists

Shakespeare
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  It’s fashionable these days to turn to the artists and writers we know and love for advice or wisdom – How to Live like Proust, how navigate the complexities of marriage and morality according to George Eliot*, how to grow up through the novels of Jane Austen.  What can the writers and artists who have endured tell us about writing?  Below are five tips from some of the best: 1. Isak Dinesen: Don’t wait for the perfect frame of mind to begin writing “When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, without faith and without hope…suddenly the work will find itself.–” Isak Dinesen. When I searched on-line for the above quote just now, I found that the words “without faith and without hope” had been deleted, as though they detracted from what Dinesen is saying. But to me, those words are what make the quote … Read on

Pamela Jane is the author of over thirty books from board books to memoir. She is also a writing coach, freelance writer, and public speaker. Learn more about her by booking a school visit, perusing her blog, or reading her memoir, An Incredible Talent for Existing: A Writer's Story.

Being Elizabeth Bennet

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By Pamela Jane I was a kid who hated school, so any book that was assigned in English was automatically suspect.  As a senior, we were assigned Silas Marner and Wuthering Heights, so predictably I decided these books were obsolete and had nothing to do with real life.  Fortunately none of Jane Austen’s novels were assigned, nor George Eliot’s Middlemarch so I never learned to hate those. During high school, my friend (and now co-author) Debbie introduced me to Austen’s novels.   Like many literate young women, I imagined myself to be the brilliant, witty Elizabeth. When I was eighteen, I fell in love, dropped out of college and ran away to live with my boyfriend, who was at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.  Apparently hating school was catchy because after a year or so, he dropped out too. David’s parents were furious with us when I went to live with him in Portland.  They were even more pissed off that I’d left, claiming I’d precipitated … Read on

Pamela Jane is the author of over thirty books from board books to memoir. She is also a writing coach, freelance writer, and public speaker. Learn more about her by booking a school visit, perusing her blog, or reading her memoir, An Incredible Talent for Existing: A Writer's Story.

Jane in the morning and Jane at Night!

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I fell asleep listening to Emma the other night on my iPod, and woke up listening to Hitler.  Struggled to wake myself up and out of the nightmare but didn’t quite succeed.  I realized in the morning that Emma had morphed into Explaining Hitler* (the books are arranged alphabetically).  Last month Middlemarch leapt into Moscow 1941. The history books are great for walking but not for sleeping. The trouble is, books can switch in the middle of the night.  The way around this is to make a playlist of the book you want to listen to during the night, so it just keeps circling. What books you listen to at night are important.  For me, only Jane Austen and George Eliot’s Middlemarch pass the test because I know and love Austen’s novels and Eliot’s masterpiece intimately and trust them completely. (Sometimes Sense and Sensibility is hard to take at night though, because Marianne’s grief and panic in London are so … Read on

Pamela Jane is the author of over thirty books from board books to memoir. She is also a writing coach, freelance writer, and public speaker. Learn more about her by booking a school visit, perusing her blog, or reading her memoir, An Incredible Talent for Existing: A Writer's Story.