It all started in Columbus

You could take James Thurber out of Columbus, which is exactly what his first wife did when she decided his talent was too big for Ohio's capital city, but you could never take Columbus out of Thurber. His hometown and the people he knew growing up and in his early newspaper career there remained the focus of his work for the rest of his life.

Bob Hunter, a former sports columnist at Thurber's old paper, The Columbus Dispatch, takes a detailed look at Thurber's life in Columbus and the stories it inspired in Thurberville.

In 48 relatively short chapters, Hunter writes about the people. places and things from Columbus that later showed up in his writing, usually fictionalized, but not by much. These include family members, boyhood friends, girlfriends, professors and fellow students at Ohio State and people he worked with in his newspaper career before he fled to New York City, joined the staff at The New Yorker and became famous.

Who was the real Walter Mitty? What inspired "The Day the Dam Broke"? Who might Thurber have had in mind when he drew those cartoons of large, intimidating women? Hunter tells all, and it turns out that all started in Columbus.

Thurberville manages to be a full biography of the great American humorist, arguably second only to Mark Twain. It takes us from birth to death, but even though much of that life was lived in New York and Paris, Columbus always remained its center. And it lies at the center of Hunter's book as well.

Hunter includes a few photographs in his book, but far too few. What the book really lacks is a map of Columbus showing readers exactly where the many homes where the Thurber family lived were located, as well as the locations of the other places mentioned. I am fairly familiar with Columbus, having been there many, many times, but even so I couldn't place houses, hotels, parks, etc., with simply an address as a guide.

Inventing Christmas

The Man Who Invented Christmas, which I watched last night, will probably not rank as anyone's favorite Christmas movie. While entertaining enough to watch once, it is not the kind of movie one watches willingly in whole or in part every December, as is the case for so many people with It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story or even Love Actually.

The film tells of Charles Dickens's struggle to write A Christmas Carol on a tight deadline and how that book turned a relatively minor holiday, at least in England, into the month-long celebration that it is today and also how the tradition of increased charitable giving at Christmas began.

Yet what I found most fascinating was what the movie, based on the book by Les Standiford, shows about the writing process.

Dickens, the movie tells us, had had three flops in a row and was desperate for a book that would reverse his fortunes. (I am now in the middle of one of those "flops," Nicholas Nickleby, and I find it amazing that such an entertaining novel could have failed to appeal to his readers.) It was already late in the year, so Dickens faced enormous pressure to get even a short book in print before Christmas.

Ideas came to Dickens from everywhere. He met a man named Marley. He overheard an Irish maid tell his children a Christmas ghost story. He encountered a miser. He had nightmares about his boyhood when his father was sent to debtor's prison. Any good piece of writing, even a newspaper story or a school essay, needs multiple sources. It is in the melding of those bits of inspiration that creativity lies.

Dickens says at one point that when he finds the right name, a character comes alive to him, which is exactly what happens when he settles on Scrooge as the name of his miser. Scrooge himself, played by Christopher Plummer, appears in the room and starts conversing with him. Soon other characters join the discussion, guiding him to the resolution of his plot.

Perhaps the most important contribution to the story comes from that Irish maid, who insists that because it's a Christmas story, Tiny Tim cannot die and Scrooge can change. Today every Christmas story has a positive ending, just another way in which Charles Dickens invented Christmas.

On taking notes

Mental Floss ended its run as a magazine three years ago, confining its product, what might be termed interesting trivia, to its website. This fall, however, they've printed a special edition of Mental Floss, reminding former readers, especially those like me who forget to check the website, what they have been missing. One of its many brief articles is about the value of taking notes on paper, just like we used to do in school.

The writer says "taking handwritten notes can benefit your brain by fostering clearer paths of understanding, increasing your ability to recall key discussion points and inspire ideas that forge new paths."

Handwritten notes, like handwriting itself, are threatened with obsolescence. Even shopping lists are today more likely to be found on phones than sheets of paper. But notes on a phone or iPad aren't quite the same as notes on paper, according to Mental Floss, which uses the phrase "science shows" without actually naming the source of that science. I am willing to believe it, however.

I take notes on index cards with every book I read. Often I don't even have to consult my notes when writing my review, except perhaps to find a page number if I need a direct quote from the book. Or I will review my notes to look for lines, ideas or themes that I may want to write about. Would electronic notes work as well? Perhaps, but that actually seems more cumbersome than a few words written on a card.

As I mentioned recently, I jotted down a few notes when I heard Susan Isaacs talk at a book event in St. Petersburg. Without those notes I would have been lost when trying to write about what she said.

Mental Floss discusses different ways of taking notes, the outline method, for instance, or the mapping method, which is less a list than a diagram. How one takes notes may depend upon how one's mind works.  I just jot down key words, then try to organize them afterward in a way that makes sense. When I was a newspaper reporter I often just jotted down words and phrases, except when trying to get few good exact quotes. From these few scraps, which triggered memories of the interview, I could usually put together a story that captured the gist of the interview or speech.

I am all for putting things on paper, which is what I wish Mental Floss would do more often.

Hero's journey

The hero takes a journey in Ivan Doig's ceaselessly entertaining 2015 novel Last Bus to Wisdom, although that hero is just "eleven going on twelve." He is an orphan named Donal Cameron, who goes by several other names as well during the course of his journey, mostly by Greyhound. Making up stories, as well as names, proves to be Donny's best talent, suggesting that in him, to use another cliche of minor-league literary analysis, we have an unreliable narrator, to say the least.

He is being raised by his grandmother, a cook at a Montana ranch, but when she needs surgery and expects a summer-long recovery, she sends him by bus to her only relative, a sister in Wisconsin with who she has never gotten along.

We soon discover why the sisters aren't close. Despite a physical resemblance to Kate Smith -- this is 1951, when even an 11-year-old boy would know what Kate Smith looks like -- Aunt Kate is a miserly, argumentative woman. Every morning Donny wakes up hearing her and Herman, the man he assumes to be her husband, arguing over the way he eats his toast. When she catches Donny stealing money, which he insists is rightfully his since his own money disappeared soon after his arrival and he was not rewarded for helping her win at cards, she puts him on a bus back home, likely to end up in foster care.

But who should show up in the seat next to him but Herman, a retired Great Lakes sailor and an illegal German immigrant who has just been living with Kate. He is a big fan of Karl May's novels about the Wild West, and he wants to see the real West with Donny.

And so begins an adventure that takes them from a rodeo to Yellowstone to a ranch owned by Rags Rasmussen, the greatest rodeo cowboy of them all.

This 450-page novel is chockfull of colorful  characters, most of whom sign the autograph book Donny takes with him. By summer's end Donny faces a terrible dilemma: return to his now-recovered grandmother, whom he has been deceiving all these weeks, or remain with Herman and Rags on the ranch he has come to love. Doig gives us a resolution, but not until the very last delicious sentence.

Good story well told

Even good stories don't tell themselves, especially when they are as complex and with as many subplots as the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat in 1915. It takes someone like Erik Larson to tell the story well, which he does in Dead Wake, published in 2015 in time for the 100th anniversary of the disaster that killed more than a thousand people, many of them Americans.

The sinking may or may not have brought the United States into the Great War against Germany. It was a contributing factor certainly, but the U.S. did not actually declare war until nearly two years later after U-boats had sunk several other ships with Americans aboard. Germany gambled that it could sink any ship on the seas, enemy or not, and win the war before the Americans could get mobilized against them. Even with a two-year advantage, they lost that bet.

Many things had to go wrong for the Lusitania to be sunk that day, especially after being hit by just one torpedo. It took delays in the ship's departure from New York, putting it behind schedule. It took a Cunard order to travel at less than maximum speed to save fuel. It took a U-boat captain willing to attack a passenger ship. It took a British decision not to send out escorts to protect the liner as it neared port. It took a sudden change in course that put the Lusitania into the U-boat's path. It took a torpedo that actually worked. Most of them didn't at this stage of the war. It even took the U-boat captain's misjudgment about the Lusitania's speed, leading to a strike in perhaps the one part of the ship where it could sink after just one hit.

All this and more, Larson tells us, had to happen for the liner to sink as it did. One positive circumstance was a clear, calm May day, which helped 764 survivors reach shore. These included the ship's captain, William Turner, who was promptly blamed by the British, especially Winston Churchill, for the sinking, perhaps as a cover for their own negligence.

Meanwhile back in the United States, President Woodrow Wilson was in love, and his romance with Edith Galt seems to occupy most of his attention, as well as Larson's, during the lead-up to the attack.

All in all, this makes a terrific story, told from many sides, and Larson keeps readers on edge during the telling.

Getting started

Back in journalism school we were taught that the first paragraph of any news story was the most important. Not only must it be good enough to entice readers to move on to the second paragraph, but it must give them the gist of the story in case they didn't. It was called the Inverted Pyramid. Put the most important facts first, then add less important details in descending order. Few readers get to the end of any story, but that's OK. They will know the basics if they read only that first paragraph.

In most other kinds of writing, writers want you to get to the end and don't want to reveal too much too soon. A murder mystery, even if written by a former newspaper reporter, rarely begins with a line like, "The butler did it." Still it is necessary to write a first paragraph that will entice readers to keep going.

That's why most writers, like reporters, give a lot of thought to opening lines. This is true of novelists, poets, short story writers, magazine writers and writers of every kind of nonfiction book (with the possible exception of most academic writers, who seem to think they need to be boring all the way through). The better the opening lines, the greater the chance readers will get hooked and want to continue reading.

Because writers give so much attention to opening lines, I as a reader like to do the same. Recently I have encountered two novels with exceptional opening lines. Let me share them with you.

The first is from Scott Spencer's Willing, reviewed here two days ago:

"So there I was, Avery Jankowsky, New York City, early twenty-first century, not terribly well-educated in light of all there was to know, but adequately taught in light of what I had to do. I wasn't someone you could push around, but I was not a leader, not a standout. I was a face in the crowd, a penitent on the edge of a Renaissance painting, a particularly graceful skater in a Breughel, the guy in the stands at the World Series, right behind the crepe bunting, his hand on his heart and his eyes bright with belief during the singing of the national anthem. Why would you even give him a second look? But you do. ..."

It goes on like this. I've given you only about half of that paragraph, but it is enough. If you are a reader who wants a murder, or at least a hint of conflict, in the opening lines, you know already this book is probably not for you. But if you enjoy novels by writers who can really write, this tells you to keep going. It could get interesting.

Now here are the opening lines Charles Dickens wrote for Nicholas Nickleby:

"There once lived in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, a worthy gentleman, who taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason: thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love."

Again there is nothing here that even hints at the novel's plot. Godfrey Nickleby, in fact, soon fades from the scene and so doesn't even qualify as a main character. The lines tell us very little, yet how could one not want to keep reading?

Mother knows best

No one really expects you to get your life on firmer footing while you're on a sex tour.

Scott Spencer, Willing

If there's one thing worse than being on a sex tour you don't really want to be on, it's meeting your mother along the way. And so we have the situation in Scott Spencer's 2008 novel Willing.

Avery Jankowsky (his fourth surname because he has had four fathers) is a frustrated freelance writer looking for a big idea to fatten his shrinking bank account. Then Deirdre, his girlfriend, reveals she has been unfaithful. So when his uncle offers him a spot, free of charge, on a sex tour featuring high-class European call girls, he views it as the gold mine he has been looking for, as well as perhaps a way to get back at Deirdre.

Off he goes with an assembly of wealthy men, trying to conduct interviews without anyone realizing that is what he is doing. Stops include Iceland, Norway and Latvia. The girls, while interesting, don't help him forget Deirdre. But why does he keep seeing his mother at every hotel?

This sounds like it should be a comic novel, and it certainly has comic elements. Deirdre is a student of Russian history, and she tells Avery she thought an affair with a Russian man might be useful research. And Spencer gives us phrases like "Scarlet A Bomb" and "I knew where the caged bird craps." Still this is serious stuff, and Spencer writes beautifully about the neediness of those who seem to have everything, about the boundlessness of a mother's love and about the power of grace.

It turns out meeting one's mother on a sex tour might not be such a bad thing after all, not if it puts one's life on firmer footing.