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Pot-Boiling: What Good Authors Do To Pay Their Bills

post #1 of 53
9/28/09 at 9:32am
Thread Starter 
I don't believe we have a thread about pot-boilers. These, as you may know, are novels that an author writes in order to make money, to keep the "pot boiling" so they can write their REAL novels, which may or may not make them a cent. Sometimes these pot boilers are great fun, sometimes they are brilliant, sometimes they are laughably bad. What are some of your favorites, or ones that might surprise us? The other day, I was reading Paul Monette's famous prize-winning memoirs Becoming a Man and Borrowed Time. After doing some internet searches out of curiosity to see what he'd done recently, I saw that in addition to other memoirs about AIDS, social activitism, etc., he'd also written the novelizations/movie tie-ins of Predator and the remake of Nosferatu. Predator? Wow! So, what are some others we may not know? (Besides Faulkner's Sanctuary and his screenplay for Chandler's The Big Sleep, of course)
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post #2 of 53
9/28/09 at 10:35am
hmmm, I don't guess Dan Brown fits into this category, does he?
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post #3 of 53
9/28/09 at 10:39am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thomas View Post
hmmm, I don't guess Dan Brown fits into this category, does he?
By now, he's made so much money he pays other writers to boil his pots. Anyway, I was thinking more "serious" writers who, either under a pseudonym or under their regular names, write books deliberately designed just to make them some cash-moneyz. Anybody (other than teh RJ, of course!) read Gore Vidal's mysteries written under the name Edgar Box?
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post #4 of 53
9/28/09 at 12:43pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by rach2jlc View Post
Anybody (other than teh RJ, of course!) read Gore Vidal's mysteries written under the name Edgar Box?

They were great, and very amusingly full of anti-homosexualist snark given that the NYT book review page had banned Gore after he wrote a novel about teh gheyz.

Of course, there were Huxley and Isherwood... Fitzgerald tried to go to Hollywood, as did Dorothy Parker...
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post #5 of 53
9/28/09 at 12:50pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by RJman View Post
They were great, and very amusingly full of anti-homosexualist snark given that the NYT book review page had banned Gore after he wrote a novel about teh gheyz.

Of course, there were Huxley and Isherwood... Fitzgerald tried to go to Hollywood, as did Dorothy Parker...

I wish Henry James would have written a book called "Passion Roundup: When Passions Collide" with one of those airbrushed paintings of Fabio on the cover.

Anyhoo, Teh City and Teh Pillar was no Dancer From Teh Dance.
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post #6 of 53
9/28/09 at 12:51pm
The contrast may not be great enough, for you, but Matthew W. Stover who, IMO wrote two of the best fantasy novels ever, also wrote the book version of part 3 (thus the last one) of Star Wars. Supposedly for the money.
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post #7 of 53
9/28/09 at 2:11pm
Im convinced Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men in order to sell the rights to the screenplay.
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post #8 of 53
9/28/09 at 2:16pm
Raymond Chandler also wrote screenplays. The most successful was Double Indemnity. He worked forever on a script about the Black Dahlia case.
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post #9 of 53
9/28/09 at 2:22pm
Do we even have any good authors? I'm convinced that all books written these days are pot-boilers.
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post #10 of 53
9/28/09 at 2:24pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by robin View Post
Do we even have any good authors? I'm convinced that all books written these days are pot-boilers.
There are LOTS of excellent writers working these days in every genre and venue. It's just that there are so many thousands upon thousands of abysmally shitty books published every year that it's become really hard to figure out what is good and what isn't. For every The Known World are fifteen Zac Efron's Thirty Minute Guide to Quantum Mechanics.
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post #11 of 53
9/28/09 at 4:14pm
Hemingway discusses this with Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast. Fitzgerald wrote a lot of short stories for magazines to fund his real projects. Hemingway says something to him along the lines of "Write what you need to write so you can write what you want to write."
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post #12 of 53
9/28/09 at 4:44pm
Somewhat similar are movie directors who make popcorn to fill theaters in between their films of more serious depth and emotional weight. A great example is Michael Bay, who sprinkles in such popular favorites as Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon to keep him in hookers and blow while saving his true talents for such works of great filmmaking genius such as Transformers, Pearl Harbor, and Transformers II - Revenge of the Fallen.
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post #13 of 53
9/28/09 at 6:03pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Douglas View Post
Somewhat similar are movie directors who make popcorn to fill theaters in between their films of more serious depth and emotional weight. A great example is Michael Bay, who sprinkles in such popular favorites as Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon to keep him in hookers and blow while saving his true talents for such works of great filmmaking genius such as Transformers, Pearl Harbor, and Transformers II - Revenge of the Fallen.
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post #14 of 53
9/28/09 at 6:11pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Douglas View Post
Somewhat similar are movie directors who make popcorn to fill theaters in between their films of more serious depth and emotional weight. A great example is Michael Bay, who sprinkles in such popular favorites as Bad Boys, The Rock, and Armageddon to keep him in hookers and blow while saving his true talents for such works of great filmmaking genius such as Transformers, Pearl Harbor, and Transformers II - Revenge of the Fallen.

Oh my God, that is awesome!
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post #15 of 53
9/28/09 at 6:15pm
You know, if writing pot-boilers and selling them was so easy, wouldn't we all do it? I know I would.
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