Notebooks, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Accidental Creative
I’ve been re-reading Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner this week, tracking down a quote I wanted to use for my thesis. It’s an incredibly intriguing book–Gardner is, after all, best known for creating Perry Mason, but was also known as the king of the pulps for a time, including a year-long stint where he maintained 13 different series characters. What’s really intriguing is that Secrets isn’t actually written by Gardner–instead, it’s an assemblage put together by two other authors using the vast archives of his notebooks, correspondence, and other resources archived at a university library. This means there’s less “this is how you do it” advice, and more glimpses into the ongoing development of the writer for whom writing did’t come naturally. Gardner taught himself to write using a lot of diligent study and stress-testing of ideas, and recorded a lot of it in his dairies and notebooks. One of the quotes that