I read this fantastic tribute to Donald Westlake’s work when it was published more than a year ago with every intention of publishing an excerpt and a link on this website, but then a whole lot of other somethings got in the way and whatever I had planned to do here vanished like an indy film producer on payday. Having suddenly come into a bit more time to spend on the fun side of this responsibility–in addition to the platform and plugin updates, bug fixes, crash rescues, EU privacy law compliance, etc–I rediscovered this little gem.
Donald E. Westlake: The Writer’s Writer’s Writer
by Scott Bradfield
LIKE MOST PEOPLE who spend too much time with books when they are young, I eventually developed the urge to write myself but found it difficult to write anything I enjoyed reading. Largely this was because I either tried too hard or was emulating so many different writers that I couldn’t establish any control over basic fictional techniques. I was too busy hunting through my Thesaurus for complicated-sounding words and manufacturing pretentious, apocalyptic stories about worlds and landscapes I didn’t know anything about.
Then, in my early teens, I attended a “speculative fiction” writer’s conference in Seattle. One of the guest writers was Harlan Ellison, known then (and now) as a funny, aggressive, short, challenging, charismatic, and unconventional writer of manifestly angry short stories, screenplays, and essays. (It may only be my imagination, but I seem to recall seeing him, on more than one occasion, marching around the lobby of our busy dormitory wearing only a terrycloth bath towel strapped around his waist while smoking a big ornate meerschaum pipe.) And while there are good reasons for remembering his larger-than-life personality, to this day I recall him simply as a lover of books. He was constantly throwing around the names of writers I didn’t know, and I was constantly scribbling those names into one of the notebooks I was constantly losing. Then, near the end of that first uncomfortable week, when it was growing increasingly apparent to everyone (especially me) that my fiction was pretty bad, Harlan Ellison gave me a piece of good advice that I have never forgotten: “Throw out that fucking copy of Finnegans Wake you’re always carrying around and go read Donald E. Westlake. He’ll teach you everything you need to know about writing fiction. Oh, and pick up some acne medication while you’re at it. Your face’s a mess.”
Read the rest of this wonderful tribute at the LA Review of Books.
And stay tuned for more (belated) updates and such or other right here.