Some additional thoughts about the book

Last week, I mentioned I was re-reading The Time Traveler's Wife. Finished it on Friday.
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?blog=86&post=361178#c24730306
et al.

Some additional thoughts about the book, and the art of writing.

♦

My HS English teacher encouraged me to write for publication, and I got some very classy rejection slips before I gave up.

At the time, I really didn't think I could be a writer. "Write what you know," they say. I didn't know anything. I'd never been anywhere, or done anything, nor had any interesting experiences, so I thought. As I said once before, all I knew was the bright joys, and dark secrets, of small-town America in the 1960s; dysfunctional families that divorce and turn into two dysfunctional families; explosive teen angst - who would read about that ordinary stuff? (!)

This is why I veered more toward comedic cartooning.

Time Traveler's Wife is the kind of book that puts me right back in that humbled-to-death frame of mind.

There is a breadth of knowledge that went into it. The fine arts: poetry, opera and music from classical to punk, literature, painting, and even details of paper arts. History and mythology. French, German. Politics. I'm in my seventh decade, and I feel so abysmally ignorant in these fields - well, under-educated at least, even with my long-ago liberal-arts upbringing - that I can sometimes only barely appreciate the references. Had I been reading with computer at hand, I might've done more websearching on many of the references - a slight problem with good old print, can't just highlight and click "search."

The author has a list of acknowledgements for assistance in research, but you can't research without a good grounding in the first place.

1st of 2