It Takes a Certain Type to Be a Writer: And Hundreds of Other Facts from the World of Writing

Erin Barrett and Jack Mingo are the Queen and King of trivia, relied upon by game shows including Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and game manufacturers. Millions of people read their daily newspaper column and together they've written twenty books. The sixth book in the Totally Riveting Utterly Entertaining (TRUE) Trivia Series puts a magnifying lens on the wacky world of writers. It Takes a Certain Type to Be a Writer will tell you everything you could possibly want, or were afraid, to know about writers, publishing, and the writing life. Bite-sized facts are organized into chapters including Everyone's a Critic, Stranger than Fiction, From Bad to Verse, Kiddie Lit, A Word's Worth, and many more. You'll learn things like: where Proust wrote (in bed with gloves on); what Voltaire drank (70 cups of coffee a day); and how James Cain prepared himself for yet another publisher's rejection. (The title The Postman Always Rings Twice had nothing to do with the plot of the best-selling novel. It was a private joke of author James Cain. His postman would ring his doorbell twice whenever the many-times-rejected manuscript came back from a publisher.) Before they became the household names they are today, Cynthia Ozick, Dorothy Sayers, and Joseph Heller all wrote advertising copy. Kurt Vonnegut wrote press releases for General Electric. Amy Tan wrote horoscopes. Before her literary career took off, Rita Mae Brown wrote screenplays, most notably for the slasher film Slumber Party Massacre in 1982. "Jack Mingo is a featured expert and regularly appears on the History Channel. "Mingo and Barrett write a nationally syndicated daily newspaper column called On This Day in History. "Erin Barrett and JackMingo's books have combined sales of more than 525,000.