Wicked, Gregory Maguire, Easton Press, Signed Edition, Sealed

Description: A magnificent, signed edition from the Easton Press! Still in shrinkwrap! From the author's website (https://gregorymaguire.com/publication/the-wicked-years-wicked/): The Wicked Years: Wicked “When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims (…) Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.” “Save a spot on the shelf between Alice and The Hobbit—that spot is well deserved.” —Kirkus Reviews Rather than the usual review, here's a link to an article by the author on his writing techniques (https://lithub.com/wicked-wouldnt-have-been-what-it-is-if-i-hadnt-written-the-novel-by-hand/) There are images of various drafts of the manuscript in the article. Wicked Wouldn’t Have Been What It Is If I Hadn’t Written the Novel by Hand Gregory Maguire on the "Word-Pictures" Revealed By Longhand ...My orderliness being a given, then, I was surprised recently when an old folder turned up in a file drawer reserved for tax documents. In it, I found a few pages that appear to be my earliest notes on the novel that would become Wicked, and a page or two of handwritten first-draft effort. These three or four pages—the initial handwritten prose effort and my “idea page”—notes printed in dot-matrix technology, that’s how old they are!— predate by several years the 1992 document that I donated to the archives of the library of the State University of New York at Albany. I had fully forgotten that in 1989 I’d already come up with the book’s title and begun to scratch out an opening scene. ...Hardly a scrap of language from my initial feint appears in the published novel. Indeed, likely I’d misplaced these pages by the time I began a more certain draft three years later in a spiral-bound college notebook (housed at SUNY’s Univ. of Albany). Those hand-written opening lines deliver almost verbatim the prose that launches chapter one of Wicked, which appeared 25 years ago this season. What intrigues me about these pages, though, is the way that my writing fiction in my adult life resembles how I wrote stories when I was 8 or 9. By which I don’t mean the kind of story I was telling. No, I mean that the act of telling a story that involves Coleridge’s famous “suspension of disbelief”—a wild fantasy about chicanery, magic, other-worldliness—is accomplished by a handwritten effort of precision and legibility. It seems to my eyes now as if this passage you see here was put down by a person used to tallying columns in an accountant’s ledger. Creative and fecund disorder regulated by an orderly hand. The act of writing by hand does several things for a writer. For one thing, for a child to be able to write a single word at all requires first to be able to draw the letters. Drawing is at the core of language, no less so than breathing is at the core of singing. To write a beautiful and captivating word—let’s say, oh, why not, “Oz”—is first to master the art of drawing a circle. No small achievement for a young person with limited fine-motor skills. Then consider the complicated “z” that follows, the antithesis of the “O”—lower case instead of upper, full of angles and reverses and arrests instead of a perfect consistency of line. I began to write books by loving to make pages. Loving to spell words. To draw. Doing a picture of a cowboy and a cat seemed, in early days, to rely on the same skill set as being able to cross the “t” in “cat” and to remember which way the “b” goes in “cowboy.” (A “cowdoy” was, among other things, a bad drawing.) As the years of early grade school passed, my handwritten words learned to march with metered confidence across a sheet of blue-ruled school-paper. This gave me nearly the same pleasure as doing a good drawing of a cowboy. Or a cat. Of course the act of writing with the art of drawing. The aim of storytelling is to make convincing pictures. The author has to give the reader something to see. To call it a word-picture may sound juvenile, but that circumlocution returns us to our pre-literate days of oral storytelling. (Those cave paintings in Lascaux may well have been the first graphic novel.) Long before I heard of left brain-right brain theories of cognitive function, before I was an abstract thinker at all or capable of speaking my thoughts, I knew that drawing and writing inform each other. When I was a child—a diligent and even monomaniacal writer of stories—if I hit a writer’s block in my prose, I would simply draw an illustration in the corner of the page and see what it showed me. Often a cue to the next written turn of events was supplied by what my visual mind wanted to draw. I still begin a new novel by hand. Writing by hand, among other things, is onerous and painful. One has to go slowly, to hesitate. The wrist aches. The mind freezes. Pausing to shake the crimps out of the muscles buys the writer a few extra moments to consider the best way to sidle into the next sentence, lasso the next image... BCMT1/3lk0

Price: 174.99 USD

Location: Tucson, Arizona

End Time: 2024-10-16T14:41:17.000Z

Shipping Cost: 6.13 USD