Funny how things connect, for English writer Pearcy Lubbock was once a librarian at Samuel Pepy’s personal library collection kept at Cambridge.

Percy Lubbock and Henry James were good friends too, of course.

I wonder if he had any relation to Thomas Saltus Lubbock – founder of Lubbock, Texas?

When I began to write novels the most admired work of theory, where prose fiction was concerned, was probably Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction. In my view, as a critic of fiction, Lubbock is pretty much Henry James writ small.

-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)

If you are getting started writing fiction, you might want to heed some of this advice from Dani Shapiro.

Quite simply: Feel completely free to write anything that you want.

Put away expectations and rationality and propriety and write on a whim.

Don’t be discouraged if your geography is stuck at home.

And (mostly) forget what those writing workshops told you.

But for the time you are in the chair, be a libertine.

Appropriateness is what editing is for.

Remember, as you begin, that you are in a remote and exotic place—the literary equivalent of far eastern Bhutan. It’s a place where no one can find you. Where anything is possible. Where, for a time, you are free, liberated from the expectations and ideas of others. You are trekking, and the vistas are infinite. This freedom is necessary whether you’re working on your first book or your tenth. In order to create a world on the page, you need to push away from the world around you. You must forget its expectations and constraints.

-Dani Shapiro, Still Writing