This time he mounts an even more assiduous effort to woo women, and his true talent is an ability to write trick-filled, highly readable stories that flatter his readers.
If you're the comedic screenwriter Robert Harling, and you've ruled out making a living as a Norma Desmond "it's the pictures that got small" drag queen, as he said the other day, you take your bag of writing tricks and go to television.
Pay attention to writing tricks and techniques as you read, and take note of any you might use in your own writing.
We wanted to write a trick that gave the audience a glimpse of that, and so we came up with the idea of doing a trick on one person while the whole of the audience sees how it's done.
In Jaron Lanier's great essay, he answers the title question when he writes, "The trick is being ambidextrous, holding one hand to the heart while counting on the digits of the other".
Describing Beard's pleasure at eating a crisp, he wrote: "The trick was to set the fragment at the centre of the tongue and, after a moment's spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth".
Delightfully illustrated by the Indian artist Ram Singh Urveti, "I Saw a Peacock With a Fiery Tail" (Tara Books, $18) dusts off a 17th-century English nursery rhyme written in trick verse; this version has die-cuts on each page to reveal the poem's hidden meanings.
She said that one of her writing tricks was to set her books in places she had visited.
And somehow that makes Paul think of one of the nifty poetry-writing tricks that he knows: you write a poem about something that's real.
I simply wanted to survive using my writing skills, but in doing so, I became bloated with jargon, corporate writing tricks (laziness), and sterility over the years.
Perhaps he's back to the drawing board, learning writing tricks from his old, long-missed professor -- the man who made Reed who he was.
