Louisa May Alcott on writing

Jacqueline loaned me a book entitled Louisa May Alcott, a Personal Biography, by Susan Cheever.

I am someone who never read Little Women.  I just couldn't get into it.  I didn't as a child. Strange, isn't it? And I tried again and can't get into it. My daughter did love it.

In the book that Jacqueline loaned me, I learned that Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women at the publisher's request. She hadn't wanted to write a book for girls. The publisher even gave her the title of the book before it was written.

Now, Alcott was a prolific writer. She actually supported her parents and siblings through her writing.  She also wrote mystery stories under a pen name. When she did sit down to write Little Women, she had had a lot of practice.

Here's the amazing thing. She wrote by hand, of course, and she just wrote chapter after chapter effortlessly without reading them over and, therefore, without editing! As she finished a chapter, she turned it in!

Bear in mind that this wasn't a book prompted from the depth of her heart. She was not attached to this book. As far as she was concerned, this was a book she had written to appease her publisher and to make money.

She had another book she had written totally from her heart, a book I had never heard of and you probably haven't either. This book, Moods, meant the whole world to Alcott. This book she wrote and rewrote and rewrote again.

This book Moods that she cared about so much, no one else seemed to. It never got positive reviews and did not sell well while Little Women, a book she had written with her left hand, so to speak, broke records and became a huge best-seller and still sells well today.

How do we account for this?

Easy is the way to do it? Not caring so much is the way to succeed? Rewriting is for the birds?

How do we account for anything?

Balzac, who wrote Madame Bovary, was a painstaking author.  As I remember, he rewrote every sentence right to the bone. Madame Bovary is also a classic.

And Charles Dickens wrote serials to make money. He wrote a chapter at a time -- it was published in a magazine. And so he wrote some of his wonderful books as potboilers to support his family and pay his bills. He himself did not always know what would happen in the next chapter! And, yet, aren't his books perfectly plotted?

I suppose if someone could discover a way to ensure writing success, that discoverer would make a fortune! He could write his books and he could also sell his discovery for a pretty penny!

Does anyone know the secret? A secret?