Eighty-six years ago today, December 27th, 1930, this article by Emilie Loring appeared in The Editor. As she often quoted, “The gods provide the thread once the web is started.”
***
So many years ago that the paper on which it was printed has yellowed, I clipped from a newspaper the following:
LOST: Sunday night, black satin slipper with buckle.
I dropped the advertisement into my notebook, sure that sometime it would make a story. Occasionally I would come across it, say to myself, “It’s good,” and put it back. One day it struck a spark in my imagination. I decided to use it. Problems arose at once. How? Why? Where?
I sat down at my typewriter and stuck the clipping in front of me. I gazed unseeingly at the black letters and numerals on the keyboard of the machine. Then, as clearly as you see the print you are reading, I saw:
Fifth Avenue. In that quiet hour before dawn when for a trifling interval the city dozes, it never sleeps. The gleaming asphalt, blanched to silvery whiteness by arc lights, stretched ahead illimitably between looming sky-scrapers, phantoms of concrete and steel, brick and glass, shadowy and unreal as the back-drop in a pantomime. In the middle of its polished surface, like a dark isle in a glistening ribbon of river, rested a slipper. Black, satin, buckled with brilliants which caught the light and threw it back transmuted into a thousand colorful sparks. A slipper of parts, unquestionably.
So far so good. I had planted the slipper. Now what? Almost before I could answer the question:
Bruce Harcourt stopped short in his long stride to regard it incredulously. How had it come there? He looked up and down the broad deserted avenue before he salvaged it. A spot of red light was dimming eastward.
It was not all so easy as that. I spent almost a year writing the story. Enthusiastic readers of “Lighted Windows” (Penn Publishing Company) write me that they sit up all night to finish it. That is the result for which I worked. When I commence to tell a story, like the Ancient Mariner who held the Bridegroom with his skiny [sic] hand and glittering eye, I say to my reader:
“Now listen Don’t move till I get through.”
Even then, when a person says to me, “I couldn’t put the book down until I had finished it,” the remark is like fingers at my throat, I am so touched and thrilled.”
***
Stars in Your Eyes is up next. Ready for a late-night read?
The Emilie Loring Collection 
This is quoted from a letter Emilie Loring’s granddaughter Linda Loring Loveland wrote to me a few years ago: “She was adventurous too, took a trip on a sailing ship with her brother and later, after marrying, the family traveled to Alaska one summer to see the glaciers. She used Alaska for a setting of Lighted Windows and the scenes she described, tho a bit exaggerated, are absolutely correct.”
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Much of the fun of researching her life has been finding the connections between fiction and fact. That trip to Alaska was a terrific adventure!
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Oh, now you have me hooked! Lighted Windows is one of the few I haven’t read yet. I love all these articles and snippets you share with us!
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Lighted Windows is one of my top favorites. I like the feisty Samp sisters,
and the premise allows so many moments of romantic tension. I hope you’ve found a copy!
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