Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Writing Process, Animals as Authors, Exclamations and More

• Interesting interview with rarely-interviewed author S.E.Hinton over at literary agent Nathan Bransford's always enlightening blog. One gem:

(Bransford): What is your writing process? Do you get it on the page and revise later? Outline? Plan ahead? Let the writing go where it goes?
(Hinton): I think I've tried every writing process there is, trying to find an easy way to write a novel. If I do find it, I'll publish it and retire. Sometimes I revise as I go. Once I used an outline. One time I thought in terms of movies and wrote scenes out of order, as they occurred to me, and stitched them together later. I wrote That Was Then, This Is Now, two pages a day and did almost no revision. I originally wrote Rumble Fish as a short story, did the novel, and threw that one away because it was too easy, and wrote it again with Rusty James as the narrator, which was not easy at all. The Outsiders was forty pages long, single-spaced, typed, in its first draft. The third draft was the one Marilyn saw. The only thing I am sure of in my "process" is that it involves a lot of staring out the window.
Read the entire interview here.

• Ahem. A web-based media internship going to the highest bidder? Nah, that just seems wrong, right? Wrong. The folks at the Huffington Post think it's okay, because it's for charity. What's next for HuffPo? Asking their (unpaid) bloggers to pay them for space?

• I don't have cats or dogs. I did have horses (five of them over 15 years), and although I'll admit I was smitten with Mr. Ed when I was a kid, I never really thought about writing anything in the voice of a pet. But apparently, many writers do. A student in one of my recent workshops, writing in the voice of her cat, got me thinking about it, and then I stumbled over the Pets and Their Authors blog, where pets "interview" their humans, who happen to be writers.

• If Elmore Leonard really meant it about exclamation points when he said, "You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose," then imagine what he'd think about this Guardian article and the (no, say it ain't so) resurrection of that questionable punctuation mark.

• Finally, one more item from across the pond. Britain crowns its first female poet laureate. Hear her roar.

Have a great weekend.