Rhyme to kill, rhyme to murder, rhyme to stomp,
Rhyme to ill, rhyme to romp,
Rhyme to smack, rhyme to shock, rhyme to roll,
Rhyme to destroy anything, toy boy.
On the microphone:
I'm Poppa Large, big shot on the East Coast.
This is what rhyme does. In a couplet, the first rhyme is like a question to which the second rhyme is an answer. The first rhyme leaves something in the air, some unanswered business. In most quatrains, space is created between the rhyme that poses the question and the rhyme that gives the answer - it is like a pleasure deferred.
Some rhyme a neebor's name to lash;
Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu' cash;
Some rhyme to court the countra clash,
An' raise a din;
For me, an aim I never fash;
I rhyme for fun.
My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy on every page. I suppose I am trying to write such a book.
A book is something that young readers can experience on their own time. They decide when to turn the page. They'll put their arm right on the page so you can't turn it because they're not ready to go to the next page yet. They just want to look at it again, or they want to read the book over and over because they really enjoy setting the pace themselves.
Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.
The first page sells this book. The last page sells your next book.
The point of page one is to make people turn to page two and if at the end of the book people think that the book was good value for money, you have achieved something, because if you haven't achieved those things you're not going to achieve the other thing.
The enemy is not the badly written page; it is the empty page the great advantage of a badly written page is that it can be rewritten. It can be improved. A blank page is zero. In fact, it’s worse than zero, because it represents territory you’re afraid, unwilling, or too lazy to explore. Avoid exploring this territory long enough, and you’ll abandon your book.
Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.
If your book is set in the plantation days of the slave-owning South and you write a little romance between two slave owners without acknowledging the system they live, that's a political gesture.
There's a difference between knowing what's on the page in a history book and actually feeling that page have curves and valleys.
I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page
There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.
There's no excuse therefore, for a 1,152 page book. I think we should all be using 300-page paperbacks. These exist.
We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.