Now that I've had my Harry Potter fix, I'm re-reading William Goldman's Marathon Man, to be followed by its lesser known sequel, Brothers.
William Goldman was a huge influence on both my reading and writing back in the day. I saw the movie Harper when I was thirteen, No Way to Treat a Lady two years later (even though he didn't write the screenplay) and, like most people, I was blown away by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969. I saw Marathon Man the first day it opened and was treated to a copy of the book as a promotional tie-in.
From a writing standpoint, Goldman's real legacy - other than perhaps The Princess Bride - is his work on screenwriting: Adventures in The Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?. Along with Stephen King's Danse Macabre (and perhaps King's On Writing), these books offer the best guide to how a writer thinks and what goes on the creative mind.
If you're a writer or just interested in how it happens, I can't recommend them highly enough.
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2 comments:
I adored ON WRITING. I admire Stephen King immensely.
Big Stevie is probably the most accessible popular writer of the last fifty years. His non-fiction work (and Goldman's) is straight-forward, thoughtful, easy to digest and grounded in the blue-collar ethics of good writing.
Strunk and White would be proud.
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