A Novel Way to Write
You could de nitely call him proli c. Author
Sidney Sheldon sold his first poem when he was 10 and two screenplays
at 18; by the time he was 25, he had three shows running on Broadway
simultaneously. But ction is Sheldon's forte. He's published nine
novels, the most famous of which is his 1974 best-seller, The Other
Side of Midnight, and this month Morrow will publish a sequel,
Memories of Midnight. How does Sheldon write so much? Well, for
starters, he doesn't type or even scrawl away on legal pads. He just
spins a tale. ''I dictate to a secretary, up to 50 pages a day-about
150 words a minute,'' he says. ''When I start I have no idea how things
will end. I just start with a character, and as I dictate, the story
comes to life.'' When he's nished talking, one of his secretaries
types up the voluminous rst draft, which can top 1,500 pages. ''I
tear it apart, tighten, polish, throw away a hundred pages at a
time — and then it gets retyped and I start all over again at page
one,'' Sheldon says. It takes him up to a dozen such drafts, and a
year to a year and a half, to get a book in shape, with the
considerable help of his three secretaries: ''I have one at each of my
houses — London, Palm Springs, and Los Angeles,'' he says. ''They're all
excellent stenographers.''
Unlearning Urdu
Next May HarperCollins will publish Marianne
Wiggins' new short story collection-more than a year behind schedule.
''History intervened,'' Wiggins explains simply. She is referring, of
course, to the death threat issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini that
forced her husband, Salman Rushdie, into hiding and wreaked turmoil
on her own life. ''The stories were called Learning Urdu, because Urdu
was Salman's native language, and I had learned so much about the
Third World through him...I was using language as a metaphor for
learning about other states of being.'' But, Wiggins says, ''I could no
longer write that book because so much has changed.'' The much-altered
collection, minus its original title story, is now called Bet They'll
Miss Us When We're Gone. ''My daughter tells me it sounds like the
title of a Beatles song, but all the stories are about loss — loss of
life, of health, of love, even the loss of one's mind.'' Wiggins is
already at work researching her next project, a novel about the
framers of the Constitution and the writing of the Bill of Rights.
''I'm having a deep problem nding women who were an important part of
this process,'' she admits. ''So I'm making them up.''
