John Cheever was born on this day in 1912.
Well, if you’re trying as a storyteller to establish some
rapport with your reader, you don’t open by telling him that you have a
headache and indigestion and that you picked up a gravelly rash at Jones Beach.
One of the reasons is that advertising in magazines is much more common today
than it was twenty to thirty years ago. In publishing in a magazine you are
competing against girdle advertisements, travel advertisements, nakedness,
cartoons, even poetry. The competition almost makes it hopeless. There’s a
stock beginning that I’ve always had in mind. Someone is coming back from a
year in Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship. His trunk is opened in customs, and
instead of his clothing and souvenirs, they find the mutilated body of an
Italian seaman, everything there but the head. Another opening sentence I often
think of is, “The first day I robbed Tiffany’s it was raining.”
John Cheever
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