REBOUND -- by Jane Kelley

The treasures of the Morgan Library in New York City always inspire me. When I visited there a few weeks ago, one of Mark Twain's notes to himself caught my eye.

 

 

As you see, he created symbols for the weather to save himself the trouble of writing out the descriptions. Aha, I thought. I could do this too! (I confess I'm a reluctant describer. ) 

 

According to the plaque, Twain had a good reason to be in a hurry to finish the novel he was writing. He was broke. 

 

This doesn't seem that extraordinary for most writers. But Twain had made a lot of money! What happened? Was he a spendthrift? No. He made unbelievably bad investments. Including starting his own publishing house, which he eventually described as "lingering suicide."

Did he learn? No. He kept sinking money into unwise investments again and again. 

He wasn't dumb. And yet, as Dan Piepenbring wrote about him in the New Yorker, "He, too, was drawn in by more than his fair share of cure-alls, gadgets, swindles, and flimflam artists."

 

 It was the Gilded Age. There were plenty of those kinds of characters around. Twain made the money he would eventually lose by writing about them. Which brings me to the theme for this month. Rebound. 

In Twain's life and in his literature, he kept trying something crazy, failing at it, laughing about it, describing it in such a way that his readers could laugh about it. And eventually moving on. 

There is a sucker born every minute. But as Twain knew, there's also a story born. Who better to write about it than Twain. Even if he preferred to draw a little picture of a umbrella instead of describing the rain. 

That's how he wrote 60,000 words IN ONE MONTH. 

It's taken me three years to write 30,000. And I haven't been describing the weather either.

JANE KELLEY is the author of many middle-grade novels. Her father was an inventor of several products including the Bait Palace, a styrofoam box whose design made it easy to retrieve worms who hide at the bottom of the container. Mark Twain would have probably invested a lot of money in that.