Event #24

They say that Joyce wrote lying on his stomach and wearing a white coat. Hemingway, instead, would continue until he’d used up a whole pencil, while Stephen King has to write 2,000 words a day, and Tom Robbins won’t finish working on a sentence until it sounds perfect to him. Every writer has his or her own fixations. But what all writers have in common is getting started. Fabio Geda, with the help of Filippo Losito and Raffaele Riba (authors on their first novel), traces the path that goes from the idea of the novel to the library bookshelf. The discussion will focus on the stages that can pry open the famous drawer the manuscripts lie in (from magazines, to prizes, to literary agencies), and on rules, if they indeed exist, to get to the heart of a good book. Like this one offered by Kurt Vonnegut: ?Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.?.