Boswell’s Meditation on Place and a Pudding

Last week I did a pleasant book-signing at Boswell Book Co. (for A Guide to Fantasy Literature; my thanks to Daniel Goldin, proprietor, and Jason, for hosting!).

Boswell Books is a Milwaukee indie bookstore, named for James Boswell (1740–95), a literary Scottish laird, described by one biographer as a complicated fellow, with “his rippling good nature, his extravagance and folly and weakness, his odd piety, his awful glooms, his alternations of revelry and solemnity . . .” and known today mostly as a companion of Samuel Johnson, the famous dictionaryist (okay, lexicographer).

He loved good conversation, liquor, travel, writing . . . hey, a man after my own heart.

Anyhow, the Boswell Books signing made me recall a lovely, fanciful “sense of place” piece from Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, written on a long excursion with Samuel Johnson in the fall of 1773 to the western isles of Scotland.

This is Boswell’s recollection of an afternoon bit of playfulness:

“. . . . He [Johnson] then indulged in a playful fancy, in making a Meditation on a Pudding, of which I hastily wrote down, in his presence, the following note; which, though imperfect, may serve to give my readers some idea of it.

MEDITATION ON A PUDDING

Let us seriously reflect of what a pudding is composed. It is composed of flour that once waved in the golden grain, and drank the dews of the morning; of milk pressed from the swelling udder by the gentle hand of the beauteous milkmaid, whose beauty and innocence might have recommended a worse draught; who, while she stroked the udder, indulged no ambitious thoughts of wandering in palaces, formed no plans for the destruction of her fellow-creatures; milk, which is drawn from the cow, that useful animal, that eats the grass of the field, and supplies us with that which made the greatest part of the food of mankind in the age which the poets have agreed to call golden. It is made with an egg, that miracle of nature, which the theoretical Burnet has compared to creation. An egg contains water within its beautiful smooth surface; and an unformed mass, by the incubation of the parent, becomes a regular animal, furnished with bones and sinews, and covered with feathers. – Let us consider; can there be more wanting to complete the Meditation on a Pudding? If more is wanting, more may be found. It contains salt, which keeps the sea from putrefaction: salt, which is made the image of intellectual excellence, contributes to the formation of a pudding.”

A delightful little piece, by a couple of writers lounging about a Scottish inn on a lazy afternoon, speculating on place and pudding.

(Reminds me of a similar, more modern “sense of place as seen in food” piece by Linda Hasselstrom. I’ll dig it out and share in a coming post.)

A Sense of Place Pilgrim – Annie Dillard

To learn to see and write better, there are great books to inspire you.

One of the finest, an exquisite book of nature writing, is Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), winner of a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, an account of a year spend looking closely at the world centered around a creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

As Eudora Welty (no slouch herself when it comes to sense of place), wrote in the New York Times Book Review: “The book is a form of meditation . . . about seeing.”

Here’s a brief sample, about a breezy late afternoon in a plowed field:

The wind is terrific out of the west. . . . It’s the most beautiful day of the year. At four o’clock the eastern sky is a dead stratus black flecked with low white clouds. The sun in the west illuminates the ground, the mountains, and especially the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer’s negative of a landscape. The air and the ground are dry; the mountains are going on and off like neon signs. Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon, like a tablecloth whipped off a table. The hemlocks by the barbed-wire fence are flinging themselves east as through their backs would break.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

A page or so earlier, she wrote:

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here.
– Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

A beautiful work, compared to Thoreau’s Walden. In another book, The Writing Life, she talks about writing, in her wonderfully exalted, prosaic style, about climbing into a desk that floats in the air, as birds fly underneath:

Get to work. Your job is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

I strongly recommend Annie Dillard’s books, full of open eyes, open heart, and beautiful prose, books to open and read again over the years.

And then, seek in your own way to write descriptions of Place that give a sense that you are in a wonderful place on “the most beautiful day,” passages that combine the two things Dillard says give birth to seeing: knowledge and love.

The Wonderfully Eccentric Characters of Charles Dickens

Don’t know about you, but I’ve been enjoying Little Dorrit on PBS the last few weeks.

Reminded me of some lines from G.K. Chesterton (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874–1936, author of the Father Brown mysteries, The Man Who Was Thursday, Orthodoxy, and The Everlasting Man, which had a big influence on C.S. Lewis, among others). Among Chesterton’s many works:  Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906).

Here are a few bits by Chesterton (from Chapter 10) on the eccentric, outlandish, quirky characters of Dickens:

The humble characters of Dickens do not amuse each other with epigrams; they amuse each other with themselves. The present that each man brings in hand is his own incredible personality. In the most sacred sense, and in the most literal sense of the phrase, he “gives himself away.”

. . . Now, the man who gives himself away does the last act of generosity; he is like a martyr, a lover, or a monk. But he is also almost certainly what we commonly call a fool.

The key of the great characters of Dickens is that they are all great fools.
. . .
It is impossible to do justice to these figures because the essential of them is their multiplicity. The whole point of Dickens is that he not only made them, but made them by myriads; that he stamped his foot, and armies came out of the earth.
. . .
It may be noticed that the great artists always choose great fools rather than great intellectuals to embody humanity. Hamlet does express the æsthetic dreams and the bewilderments of the intellect; but Bottom the Weaver expresses them much better.
. . .
There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word “suffer,” and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word “gladly,” and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation.

[Found the entire text of Chesterton's Charles Dickens: A Critical Study on a few web pages created by Mitsuharu Matsuoka, Nagoya University, Japan.]

As you may know, I’m a proponent of the quirky character (here’s a recent article, “In Praise of Eccentricity,” from my newsletter).

Indeed, let’s “make our familiarity with fools a delight”! And who better to learn from than the great Mr. Dickens?

The Power of Poe: Use of the Gripping Image

Imagery for a master writer isn’t just coming up with a nice turn of phrase . . . one that conjures up a sunset suddenly appearing like a distant marching band turning the corner . . . or the sense of a breeze on the skin like a silk scarf.

A truly compelling image is the one that grips your imagination by the throat and just won’t let go.

For examples, there’s no better place to turn than Edgar Allan Poe. Founder of the detective story, master of the creepy short story, and a quotable poet, this is his 200th anniversary (he was born Jan. 19, 1809), and I highly recommend the Read Street series of blog posts on Poe in the Baltimore Sun.

Here a couple of excerpts from those posts that refer to Poe’s command of the gripping image – how it can hold your attention and burrow into your brain.

Where in your own writing can you create and point the reader’s attention to a glorious, unforgettable image?

In this Read Street guest post by Rob Velella, creator of the Edgar Allan Poe 2009 Bicentennial Desk Calendar, Velella describes Poe’s timeless appeal:

Poe was the first author that I wasn’t ashamed to enjoy – and I remember what pulled me in were his sights and sounds. I heard the tremor in the narrator’s voice when he told me how “calmly” he would tell me the whole story. I saw the old man’s evil, vulture-like eye, blue film and all. I heard the sound of the old man’s heart, beating like the ticking of a watch when enveloped in cotton.

What appealed to me then is still what appeals to me now: his ability to take words that do more than tell a story, but show one. He was a writer of sensation, creating images that are impossible to forget – a writhing black tongue in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” a shackled man in jester’s motley appealing “for the love of God!” in “The Cask of Amontillado,” and the one-eyed black cat sitting triumphantly on the head of a murdered wife in “The Black Cat,” just to name a few.

Here is another excerpt from the Read Street series on Poe, by a member of the South African-born mystery writing team known as Michael Stanley (with Michael Sears), Stanley Trollip’s Read Street blog post on Poe:

Of everything I read, I only recall a few vividly. The one that had perhaps the greatest impact on me was Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” After I turned the bedside light out, darkness brought vivid mental pictures of impenetrable cell walls and a gaping hole in the middle of my bedroom floor. The swish of curtains nearly caused cardiac arrest as I imagined a great scythe swing ever closer to my shaking body. I knew that creaks in the house meant that the walls were closing in. Mice running across the pressed metal ceiling of my room convinced me that rats were swarming all around my bed. My active imagination took its toll, and I was terrified for weeks after finishing the short story.

How did Poe achieve these effects? Here’s a bit from commentary on the “The Raven” poem, in the 1884 Harper & Brother edition (illus. by Gustave Doré), written by Edmund Clarence Stedman, a 19th-century poet.

The components of “The Raven” are few and simple: a man, a bird, and the phantasmal memory at a woman. But. . . . What have we? The midnight; the shadowy chamber with its tomes of forgotten lore; the student, — a modern Hieronymus; the raven’s tap on the casement; the wintry night and dying fire; the silken wind-swept hangings; the dreams and vague mistrust of the echoing darkness; the black, uncanny bird upon the pallid bust; the accessories of violet velvet and the gloating lamp.

He notes that “all this stage effect of situation, light, color, sound, is purely romantic, and even melodramatic,” but is so effective. The bottom-line: it works.

Here’s one last example, from “The Masque of the Red Death,” the description of the fitful effect caused by the hourly chiming of a “gigantic clock of ebony” that stood “against the western wall” in a set of princely rooms where a masked ball was being held.

Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.

Poe had the knack for the image that stuck in the brain, like one from a dream that is odd, memorable, mysterious . . . and so concrete that you wonder if indeed you dreamed it . . . and pray to god that you did.

His feverish imagery isn’t necessarily to imitate, although masters like Stephen King have pulled it off, but to learn from. One of Poe’s tricks: he often combines description of the image with the distinct effect it has on those that encounter it.

The gripping image is a technique that can be used in powerful writing from journalism to fiction. Find the odd, eccentric, specific image that holds the imagination, and you can push the reader to feel emotions – of fear, unease, delight, or compassion – because of the power of their own imaginations to continue where you left off.

December Hodgepodge (on creativity)

As 2008 prepares to lead us into 2009, here are a few thoughts (about creativity, the writing process, and looking ahead) to savor:

Fiction. . . . It’s like goading a mongoose and a cobra into battle and staying with them to see who wins.
– Shauna Singh Baldwin, author of What the Body Remembers and The Tiger Claw

Q: What is your writing process like?
I sit down and think: “what’s the worst thing that can happen?”
– Carrie Ryan, author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth
[I think she means the worst thing that can happen to her characters . . . not to the writer.]

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
– Charles Mingus

Q: Where is your favorite place to write?
In my car. An old habit, I guess . . . when my daughter was a baby she wouldn’t nap in her crib. I used to drive around until she fell asleep, then I’d pull over and write for a few hours. Now she’s a teenager, but I find I still do my best work in the car – I’m not tempted to walk away and do something else, and no one interrupts me!
– Jen Bryant. author of books for young readers, including A River of Words (about William Carlos Williams) and Georgia’s Bones (about Georgia O’Keefe)

The moment one gives close attention to anything,
even a blade of grass,
it becomes a mysterious, awesome,
indescribably magnificent world in itself.
– Henry Miller, novelist

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach; one can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Tips for Writers from Jack Kerouac
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
[from a longer list, but you get the point.]

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.
– Ansel Adams

Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
– George Carlin

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
– Yogi Berra

Today
– (a single word, carved on a stone that sat on John Ruskin’s desk)

What lies behind us and what lies before us
are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Read Your Work Out Loud

In a 2004 interview with Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate (2004-06), on the PBS News Hour, Kooser talked about writing with clarity – so that a piece or passage (in his case, a poem) could be understood by the average person. He recalled how early in his career, when he worked in the insurance business, he would bring a poem in to work and read it to his secretary:

I’m always revising away from difficulty and toward clarity. [. . .] I’d write every morning very early, and then I would bring my work in [to the insurance company where I worked] and I’d say, “Joanne, does this make any sense to you?” And if she said, “Well, no, it doesn’t,” then I would try to find out where it fell down for her.
– Ted Kooser

In an article I did not long ago for my Great Lakes Lit newsletter on the value of reading stories aloud, I mentioned a similar story from a few centuries earlier. The intro to the 1786 edition of Gulliver’s Travels refers to Jonathan Swift asking two menservants whether they understood the meaning of passages read out loud to them.

Swift’s desire: to ensure that his meaning was clear . . . not just to him but to a broader audience.

So often, we fail to recognize how our words force a new reader to stumble, or be puzzled, or to roll their eyes at some intrusion of purple prose or a lame cliche.

Reading passages of your work aloud, whether to your writing group or to a spouse (so few of us have valets, let alone secretaries, to listen to our drafts), is an excellent way to test at least the opening lines of a story or the key paragraph in your pitch letter.

Even if the audience is an imaginary one, reading aloud on your own will allow you to hear your words afresh, using a different part of the brain (and one that was less invested in writing those words . . . and more likely to find a few clunkers that can be improved).

NaNoWriMo, a Literary Feast of Fools?

No Plot! No Problem!
Or as the Guinness guys shout: Brilliant!
Or is it: No clue!

What is NaNoWriMo? A great surge of literary energy? Or a Feast of Fools? From their website:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

In 2007, we had over 100,000 participants. More than 15,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline. . . . They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

This NaNoWriMo blog has lots of positive anecdotal stories:

Every year of NaNo, I feel like a winner, just for taking time for myself to do something I love, and to do it intensely.

I agree that Writing, for a lot of us, means taking the time, finding that core of passion, and dealing with the intensity of the process. Personally, I find ways to motivate myself (here are 6 of them), like grabbing a glass of red wine and telling myself “I’ll just write for 15 minutes.”

Writing often seems a solitary struggle: man/woman against the blank page of infinite possibilities. We all need writing buddies, real and virtual.

So I understand that for some, the cheerleading and sense of community of NaNoWriMo gets the writer’s blood pounding and fingers flying on the keyboard.

Personally, I recommend a more steady, stick-to-it approach. For most, 500 words a day and a good 3-month plan will get you further than an intense November.

As an editor of books of advice for writers, I’ve studied for years the techniques of successful authors of all genres and approaches. Only a few (Georges Simenon, Belgian author of the Maigret crime novels) comes to mind as ones who did anything like NaNoWriMo. The Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Simenon says “Typing some 80 pages each day, he wrote, between 1923 and 1933, more than 200 books of pulp fiction under 16 different pseudonyms, the sales of which soon made him a millionaire.” Zounds!

This story about Simenon is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock:

Alfred Hitchcock was said to have telephoned, only to be told by Simenon’s secretary that [Simenon]e couldn’t be disturbed because he had just begun a new novel. Hitchcock replied: “That’s all right, I’ll wait.”

Here’s another Simenon story:

What brought Simenon . . . to the attention of the public was not so much his skill as his extraordinary energy as a writer.  . . .So notorious did his speed of composition become, that on 14th January 1927 he signed a contract with publisher Eugène Merle undertaking to spend seven days in a glass cage outside the Moulin Rouge nightclub, during which time he would write a novel which was subsequently to be serialised in Merle’s newspaper, Paris-Matinal.

(The paper folded before the event took place, but Simenon kept the advance and enjoyed the media interest for the planned stunt.)

So . . . I can’t say the intensity of NaNoWriMo, or being locked in a glass cage for seven days outside a night club to write, will do any serious harm to a writer. Most will probably build up at least some ideas, passages, maybe self-confidence (or not), maybe some progress on a project.

But that’s a lot of energy to spend on something that’s better training for pulp fiction than for most writing aspirations.

My November challenge: ask yourself, honestly, what really works for you? Not what is fun, or a literary adrenalin rush, or a heightened sense of community, or the power of an oath of commitment (good things in moderation). . . . but what is really going to advance your writing?

For some, NaNoWriMo is going to be the trick that works. No problem! But then . . . what’s your plan for the next three months, and beyond?

As I said in my Afterword to The New Writer’s Handbook, Vol. 2, “One of the oddities of the writing world is that it allows you – in some ways glorifies the tendency – to continue in fruitless ways. To grow as a writer, be more honest about evaluating what works.”

Studs Terkel and the Golden Story

A farewell tip of the hat to Louis “Studs” Terkel (1912–2008), who passed away last Friday.

I owe a great personal debt to his inspiration. His books got me started in collecting oral history and writing my first book, an effort of many years to record the stories and music of ordinary, homegrown fiddlers, the old-time musicians of Midwestern farm neighborhoods.

A lot of those field trips were taken on a motorcycle, with my mouse-chewed fiddle strapped in its case to the roll-bar, leaning into the curves of the coulee roads, in search, from one lead to the next, of anyone who could tell a few stories and play a few tunes.

They were talented but self-taught fiddlers, run-of-the-mill sawyers and parlor virtuosos, who played at house parties (“kitchen sweats”), mostly through the winter months when farmwork was slow . . . when neighbors wanted to get together, roll up the rug and carry out the cookstore, and dance till the sun came up the next morning.

That resulted in a book I did, with wonderful documentary photos by a good friend, Lewis Koch of Madison. Farmhouse Fiddlers: Music & Dance Traditions in the Rural Midwest is still available here and there online.

To share a few words of advice on storytelling from the great Terkel (from his memoir, Touch and Go):

What first comes out [of an interview] are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands.

But that was just the beginning:

Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust.

That sums up the storyteller’s gift: to take the mountains of stuff that is told or written in the first draft . . . to sift through it for the good stuff . . . and then, in the jeweler’s magical workshop, to find that golden form, to shape it into something of beauty that others will treasure . . . for many, many years.

It’s not just the words . . . but the shape of the tale that carries it out into the world to be passed as a gift from one to the next.

Thanks, Studs. You showed us the way.

From Cavemen to Chekhov (on Storytelling)

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was a master storyteller, a beacon to those who followed his glittering lead, such as Eudora Welty and Raymond Carver, who considered him one of the greatest influences on their own work.

You can’t read too many Chekhov stories. Here is the beginning of “Gooseberries.” (Yes, it begins with a description of place, dear to my heart, as you know by now. Weather, no less.)

The whole sky had been overcast with rain-clouds from early morning; it was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey dull weather . . . when one expects rain and it does not come. Ivan Ivanovitch, the veterinary surgeon, and Burkin, the high-school teacher, were already tired from walking, and the fields seemed to them endless.

Then, Chekhov delivers that compelling line:

“Last time we were in Prokofy’s barn,” said Burkin, “you were about to tell me a story.”

Ivan Ivanovitch heaves a sigh begin to tell his story – “Yes, I meant to tell you about my brother” – but just as he lights a pipe, the rain begins . . . and we have to wait as they tromp to a nearby farm, wash up, and retire to the drawing room.

And only when the lamp was lighted in the big drawing-room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanovitch, attired in silk dressing-gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in arm-chairs; . . . and when lovely Pelagea [a beautiful maid-servant], stepping noiselessly on the carpet and smiling softly, handed tea and jam on a tray – only then Ivan Ivanovitch began on his story. . . .

The hook has been baited. We all sink into comfy arm-chairs in the mind’s parlor . . . and wait for the story. At first, the story (about Ivan’s eccentric brother whose goal in life is to own a farm with gooseberry bushes) seems to be just an odd tale about a goofy person. Then Chekhov brings it home to a human issue: what is needed for a person to be happy? How is happiness earned?

And to what extent is it ever truly deserved?

His storytelling in a nutshell: 1) a curious starting point, 2) what happens, 3) some meaning it holds or interesting ideas it spawns . . . not necessarily a moral, but why the tale has stuck in the head, why it is worthy of telling.

I was recently reading an interview with Harlan Coben, American author of a series of crime novels in the style of Raymond Chandler, featuring a 6-foot, 4-inch hero called Myron Bolitar. Coben started by saying what we writers should hold dearest to our heart: “I love stories.”

And I liked his imagery of a motivation:

“When I’m writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we’re cavemen, we’re sitting around the fire, and I’m telling you stories. If I bore you, you’re probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.”

Stories. Simple? Not really. I also read an article in Scientific American (“The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn”) that suggested that stories were how early humans began to organize and keep track of more relationships as their societies grew in volume of people and complexity.

And the author, Jeremy Hsu, had this remarkable point:

A 2007 study by marketing researcher Jennifer Edson Escalas of Vanderbilt University found that a test audience responded more positively to advertisements in narrative form as compared with straightforward ads that encouraged viewers to think about the arguments for a product. Similarly, Green co-authored a 2006 study that showed that labeling information as “fact” increased critical analysis, whereas labeling information as “fiction” had the opposite effect. Studies such as these suggest people accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode as opposed to when they are in an analytical mind-set.

Stories. We seek them out, we listen, and  . . . most important to writers . . . we like them. If told well, we even believe in them; we “buy” them in more ways than the commercial one. Learn to tell a story well, and you’re on the path to literary success.

Oh, The Places My Brand Will Go!

I’ve been reading several biographies of the peerless Dr. Seuss, and realized how gifted he was . . . not just in the field of children’s literature but also as a practitioner of personal branding for writers.

If you’re like me, you grew up with Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, The Cat in the Hat, Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, and all the other zany creatures, places, and situations devised by this master of the rhyming, readable children’s book.

Pick up any Dr. Seuss book, even one you haven’t opened before, and you have a good inkling of what you’re going to get. And each book delivers. This is the essence of branding.

In a Seuss book, you expect:

Rollicking, read-out-loud rhymes. Smile-inducing lines that stick in our heads for years: “I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I do not like them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am.” From Green Eggs and Ham, of course.)

A memorable, intriguing pen name. Seuss was Ted Geisel’s middle name, his Germanic mother’s family name. It originally rhymed with “voice,” but later was Americanized to rhyme with “juice.”) The “doctor” part was an imaginary self-awarded accolade, something he’d never earned in school. It combined one part respectability, one part the wacky world of a patent-medicine quack.

A delightful overdose of imagination unleashed. Seuss wrote and drew a pantheon of imaginative creatures and landscapes, the likes of which we’d never seen before (no one knew what a Grinch was before Seuss showed us his nasty, conniving, easily irritated soul).

A plain but playful vocabulary. A Seuss book tosses words joyfully back and forth like a jump-rope chant, with pleasure in silly sounds, multiple meanings, and odd associations of words that rhyme or just pop out.

In the end, a moral to the story. Geisel said that in a story, there are only two choices: the good guys win or the evil ones win. He made sure the good ones did, so Thidwick wanders off a happy moose, his goodness intact after his antlers fell off, while his selfish freeloading friends get their comeuppance.

All this adds up to Geisel/Seuss having become one of the most successful children’s book authors of all time.

Born Theodore Seuss Geisel in a German-American family in Springfield, Mass., he attended Dartmouth, then England’s Oxford, but was more passionate for classroom doodles and comic quips than for serious academic studies. He came of age in 1920s, the clever-quipping, convention-breaking era of the flapper. After graduation, he plunged into the advertising business in New York City, submitting cartoons and writing jingles. His big break-through was a jingle for bug-spray: “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” The short tag-line was the core of a 17-year campaign; it became embedded in the American consciousness, a line used by radio comedians like Jack Benny for a quick laugh. Branding at its best.

So like many successful writers, Geisel thought hard and professionally about how to capture people’s attention and imagination quickly. And in his books, he knew how to talk about important subjects: friendship, exploring the world, telling the truth, doing the right thing.

(And like many, he also had to endure some bad reviews, such as a letter received from a convict on death row in Texas. It read, “If your stuff is the kind of thing they’re publishing nowadays, I don’t so much mind leaving.” Ouch! Ted kept the letter.)

One of his masterpieces, The Cat in the Hat, grew out of a challenge from a friend and publisher, William Spaulding of Houghton Mifflin. Following the public furor of a popular book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, Spaulding presented a challenge to Geisel: write a book for young readers using only 225 words of basic vocabulary, a list he provided.

It wasn’t easy. It was like trying to make, Geisel said, “strudel without any strudels.” But he stuck with it, and eventually the wily cat with the goofy hat and his canny cohorts, Thing One and Thing Two, came into the world to delight and enchant generations of young readers.

Laura Backes of Children’s Book Insider wrote, in a wonderful article, “What Dr. Seuss Can Teach Us” (reprinted in The New Writer’s Handbook 2007), why The Cat in the Hat not only encouraged kids to read but offered a new kind of literature:

It also changed how children’s book authors learned to write. Instead of telling a thin story based on a simple, everyday incident, Seuss packed the plot with action that escalated on every page. Rather than relying on one-note characters, he populated his book with quirky, complex and surprising personalities that didn’t always cooperate with one another, thus creating tension and conflict.

I highly recommend the biography, Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel, by journalists Judith and Neil Morgan, for wonderful insight on how Geisel’s successful techniques in marketing himself and growing a career. He invented a new brand of children’s book. And he built it one book at a time, thinking about young readers and what they liked to read, think about, imagine.

Myself, I never imagine a Dr. Seuss book except as a well-worn slim volume, held in my own hands as I read it to my kid brother . . . enjoying each page, again and again, as much as he did.

The books of Dr. Seuss are reliable in delivering a distinctive product: a combination of bright imagination, flowing rhymes, crazy critters, and a sense of what kids really like to read.

Now that’s branding.