I drove to Carmel Sunday afternoon and attended the “Author to Author” lecture series hosted by the Carmel Public Library Foundation. The CPLF schedules these events throughout the year. This presentation involved three published authors and the topic was “Fiction: Writing the Novel and Getting It Published.”

The three authors presenting the program were Alex A .Vardamis, Cornelia Read, and Robert Irvine. They were seated near a huge fireplace in the Barnet Segal Reading Room, located just to the right of the entrance to the Harrison Memorial Library. Tom Parks moderated the discussion and asked questions. Somehow, about 75 people squeezed into the large room, with some of them sitting in chairs beyond the rail along an upper floor balcony. I was surprised to see that many come out on such a rainy day.

I didn't learn much. Unfortunately, Mr. Parks failed to take full advantage of the hour. It takes a special talent to interview a panel such as this. It's not as simple as just writing down a few questions. I realize Mr. Parks had a remarkable career as a writer and dialogue coach in Hollywood. Nonetheless, the panel's presentation was a little flat. Perhaps having one author, not three, would have been better. That way, we might have been able to dig deeper into the life of a professional published writer and gained some insight into how they deal with publishers, agents, and editors in a changing industry.

Mr. Parks touched on the Kindle 2 controversy from Amazon, but it was clear he didn't fully understand the issues involved. Mr. Vardamis probably summed up the whole discussion by saying that “the Kindle is probably the wave of the future...it's how things will be done since printing costs are so high.”

The one thing that really stuck out in my mind after hearing the discussion? Writing is an individual and lonely pursuit. Every writer is unique, and each has their own opinions on the process and practice of being a writer. Writing is as unique to the individual as fingerprints. When a writer puts words to paper he is fingerprinting an idea, saying a thing that no one else will say in exactly the same way.

Finding one's voice as a writer, then, should be easy. All we must do is write what we will. How we choose to write it is our business, and others be damned.

A Tale of Two Wolfe's

I've been reading a collection of short stories by Thomas Wolfe. This is the Wolfe born in Ashville, North Carolina in 1900 and published his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, in 1929. He died a young man in 1938 leaving a trail of manuscripts and stories that have become literary masterpieces.

He is not to be confused with the current writer Tom Wolfe. This Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1931. This Wolfe began his career as a journalist writing for the Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune. He called his mixture of literary techniques and journalism a "new journalism" that experimented with various ways to tell a fact-based story. He may be best known for his novel Bonfire of the Vanities.

Thomas Wolfe attended Harvard, while Tom attended Yale. Thomas taught for time at New York University and later spent time traveling through Europe. Tom, however, spent ten years as a newspaper journalist, mostly as a general assignment reporter.

I'm now reading The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe (Francis E. Skipp, Ed., 1987). The compilation contains all of his published short story material. The stories are arranged by date, in the order in which they were published.

Having just finished a book on the friendship between U.S. Grant and William T. Sherman, I suppose the idea of reading two authors with the same name was intriguing to me. They certainly weren't friends, nor even knew each other. Tom Wolfe was only eight years old when the elder Thomas Wolfe died at the age of 38. But a pairing is a pairing, even if only by name. I also just purchased a book published in 2003 on the friendship between Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt.

For whatever reason, I'm interested in juxtaposing two historical figures, or in the case of the Wolfes two authors, and discovering what I can about their relationships. I'm not sure I'll learn anything by placing Thomas and Tom side-by-side as I read their works, but I have a sneaking suspicion that something will emerge through their writings that will be simpatico.