Word: crafting
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...like that, and if you've ever tried Rex Stout you'd know after three of four books that Nero Wolfe is really just a fat old fart. Almost every collection of one-author-one-genre books gets repetitive after a while: critics betray this by calling thrillers a "craft" or a pulp writer a "masterful technician," generally revealing that the formulas don't hold up for long and that while reading them is somewhat understandable in this cruel world, the activity is about as respectable as doing crossword puzzles or eating Darvon. Life's little sordid pleasures...
...Hara worked hard at his craft. He retained a keen interest in current slang, and the 1972 supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary credits him as the source of 11 words, including the now familiar "fuck-up." He was particularly concerned with the visual composition of the printed paragraph. As a young writer, he spent hours over A Farewell to Arms, using Hemingway's paragraphing as a model for his own work...
Like Tony Costello, O'Hara felt he had gained a complete mastery over his own craft. "I saw and felt and heard the world around me and within my limitations and within my prejudices, I wrote down what I saw and felt and heard," he said in an interview. "I tried to keep it mine and where I was most successful it was mine...
Simenon's failure here is due to the lack of any coherent understanding of the craft of writing--or in this case, dictating, which only resembles real writing insofar as it is printed. Simenon starts with only the vaguest notions of what he will do and after a certain prescribed period of time (in the case of Letters to My Mother, one day), finishes. In that time a simple story-line emerges, sustained by the most elementary event-to-event, casual thinking. Ironically this dearth of complexity is the peculiar strength of his roman policier: the name Maigret itself connotes...
...Steinbeck had a simple conception of his craft, he had a simple view of life as well--or at least that's what he claims. At one point he said...