Walking where Hemingway walked

 When I was in Paris I got to visit several of Hemingway's haunts. Somewhere along the fourth floor of this place is where he lived.

It is an hotel though.

And according to what I've read, these are two of the places he liked to drink.

What I Learned from Dead People (Mostly)

No. This isn't a post about me whipping out a Ouija board and contacting the dead, no matter how much I love ghost and horror stories. 

It's just that the bulk of my favorite writers tend to be of the "late" variety. I'm one of the oddball readers who doesn't just call a writer a favorite only because I like their work, but instead they become a favorite more because I learn something from them. I become a better writer because I read them. They influence, nay, infect me with their work. 

That said, I'm really working hard at discovering more living writers who have something to say to me about the craft -- something that isn't just a rehash of the lessons from the already dead folks. (Sure, call me a snob. I've earned it.)

Ernest Hemingway

Papa re-taught me how to write. I totally ignored Hemingway in high school when we read "Indian Camp" and "Hills Like White Elephants," but when I discovered him again in college and tackled books like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, I actually paid attention. 

What I had thought was boring in high school, I later appreciated as direct, succinct, non-flowery. And I loved it. Then, when I took a class on short stories and revisited the Nick Adams stories (and Hills Like White Elephants), I realized I was seated at the foot of a master craftsman in the art of dialogue. He was the first writer I found who let people talk around the things they wanted to say instead of talk about them. 

And that is a lightbulb moment that has followed me in my writing ever since.

Zora Neale Hurston

Woman have the most important keys of all, according to Zora Neal Hurston, in her collected folk tales Men and Mules. Those are the keys to everything that drives a man to want for himself, the kitchen and the bedroom, food and sex, his belly and his, well, you know. 

Hurston never shied away from the truth of her world. Women didn't have the power they deserved. They were treated like second-class citizens, and if one was a black woman, it was closer to third-class, right behind black men. Still, she knew the power and pride and ability she owned as an African-American woman, and those things permeated her works. Their Eyes Were Watching God, even if divorced from her full body of work, shows the life of a woman who was willing to every tool at her disposal to live life on her own terms and to achieve personal freedom, even if she had to move from man to man to man to no man in order to do it. 

In short, Zora taught me about how who I am and where I am as a writer influence me. Those things make me the way I am. They contribute to my beliefs and my character and my ideals. And there's no reason to shy away from them just because I'm telling a story. Let them flow. Chase the things I believe in and trust the story to find others who believe in them too. 

Ray Bradbury

I can write whatever the hell I want. That's the lesson I learned from Ray Bradbury. 

Do I want to write a collection of science fiction stories? Then do it. Do I want to write a mosaic novel about growing up in a small town? Then do it. Or maybe a sci-fi pseudo-novel told in short stories? Go ahead. Time's a wastin'. How 'bout a horror novel? Sure. Go right ahead. 

Don't let the machine pigeonhole you. Pay no attention to the genre markers that tell you "Thou shalt not pass." The whole of the world of storytelling is your plaything. 

There are no areas of the map you can't travel to. And there's nothing the machine or the marketing department can do to stop you. 

Motivational Monday: Drilling Rock

[Link] Ernest Hemingway’s Writing Wisdom in 13 Rules

by Vishal Wagh

In an age of endless words, Hemingway wrote with a rifleman’s precision. Here’s how.

He didn’t waste ink. He stripped sentences down to their bare bones and nerves. His sentences were clean, sharp, and often unfinished.

Today, we scroll past clickbait, skim walls of text, and still crave something that feels real. Hemingway’s advice isn’t just for novelists, but for anyone who writes. Journalists, marketers, copywriters, and even the poor soul drafting emails on deadline.

What made his style revolutionary was the restraint. The trust in the reader. He left room between the lines. You never got the whole story, just the part you needed to feel it.

So, whether you're hammering out a novel or tightening your blog post, the following 13 tips—straight from Hemingway’s philosophy—will change how you write. The Foundations—Hemingway’s Core Principles:

1. Use Short Sentences

Short sentences help you hit. They leave no room for confusion or escape. Hemingway wrote as if he were reporting from the front. No lace. No soft landings.

Read A Farewell to Arms. Then read anything from the Victorian era. One feels like a punch; the other, a parlor trick. He achieved certain effects by keeping his sentences short, clarity, dramatic effect, variety, and melodic quality. They made you choose your words carefully.

Write the sentence. Cut it in half. Then see if it still works. If it does, keep it.

Read full article: https://nofilmschool.com/hemingway-writing-rules

Motivational Monday: Born That Way

[Link] Evocation and allusion: Hemingway’s book titles

by Jeffrey Meyers

The best titles of Hemingway’s novels and stories have biblical and literary sources, poetic evocations of the themes, and allusions to tragedy, trauma and death.  His fiction often returns to his teenage wound and narrow escape from death during World War I in Italy.  By suggesting the physical locales and using bitter irony to foreshadow fatal events, he enhances the meaning of his work, reminds readers of literary associations and draws them into the tales.

The title of The Garden of Eden (published posthumously in 1986) comes from Genesis 3:24, “So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword” to keep Adam and Eve out.  The title warns that the characters’ idyllic life in France and Spain will not last.

A Moveable Feast (1964), with its idiosyncratic spelling, comes from a heading in The Book of Common Prayer (1549): “Movable feasts, Tables and Rules.”  These holidays are not fixed dates like Christmas, but like Easter occur on a different day each year.  Hemingway uses the phrase literally to suggest the endless youthful pleasures of food, drink, sport, friendship, sex and love in Paris during the 1920s.  In Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) Colonel Cantwell says “Happiness, as you know, is a movable feast.”  In the posthumously published True at First Light (1999) Hemingway (himself often a movable beast) calls love a “moveable feast.”  But the melancholy mood beneath the festivities warns that these pleasures cannot last.

In In Our Time (1925) the sketches of life and death, which capture essential moments between 1914 and 1923, ironically echo the hope expressed and invocation denied in The Book of  Common Prayer, “Give peace in our time, O Lord.”  After World War I the soldier Nick Adams experiences bitter trauma rather than tranquil peace.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) comes from Ecclesiastes 1:4-5, quoted in the epigraph:  “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.  The sun also ariseth,  and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.”  The preacher declares the world is nothing more than “vanity of vanities.”  Men soon die, but the earth lasts forever.  The pristine fishing scenes in the Pyrenees mountains of Spain contrast with the characters’ decadent life in Paris.

In To Have and Have Not (1937), the 1930s Depression theme suggests the struggle for existence; the unequal conflict between the rich and the poor; between those who own and don’t work and those who work but don’t own.  Hemingway quotes Matthew 25:29 to express the economic conditions of the poor: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

Read the full article: https://www.thearticle.com/evocation-and-allusion-hemingways-book-titles

Envy and Imitation

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;
that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel or
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

It's okay. Every writer does it. I do it. You do it. The best-sellers do it. The indie savants do it. 

We tend to ape -- sometimes unintentionally, sometimes on purpose -- our favorite writers and pick up on the traits we enjoy about their work. 

When I started writing, I was determined to be the next C.S. Lewis. Not the Narnia Lewis but the Space Trilogy and the Till We Have Faces Lewis. Because of that, my writing was overblown and way too wordy. And I also sounded British--using British turns of phrase and UK slang. Don't take my word for it. You can trust the fine folks at The New Yorker and The Missouri Review, who both told me the same thing. I still have both rejection letters in a binder with other memories from my writer's journey. 

When I started my Bachelor's classes in Literature, I found out how much I loved the novels and short stories of a certain boisterous and burly man-baby named Hemingway. So I moved on from the verbose intelligence and heavy vocabulary of C.S. Lewis for the clean, crisp, succinct prose of Papa Hemingway. 

The trouble was that I was still playing the imitation game. 

Only something was changing, something I wasn't even aware of.

Every Man's Education

After Hemingway, I went down the 20th Century American Literature rabbit hole. There was Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes (yes, stories not just poetry), and Shirley Jackson. As their ideas and styles added to what I had learned to apply from Papa, I noticed my way of writing changed significantly. I retained my love for simple sentences and direct nouns and verbs without lots of adverbs and adjectives, but I turned away from trying to be so "Literary" and embraced the "Southern" of my youth. 

And so began my phase of "Southern Literary" where I found the themes of Welty, O'Connor, Hurton, etc. weaving into my fiction. However, the voice was always changing from the Lewis/Hemingway copycat to something new that blended bits and bobs from lots of influences. 

It was during this time that I wrote for the award-winning Cyber Age Adventures. Being a literary writer, you can imagine the fun I had crafting superhero stories with my lens of literary impact and import. Somehow, it worked. Between Frank Fradella's RPG-inspired adventure yarn set in real-world physics and repercussions, Tom Waltz's quasi-military approach, and my focus of American Literature, we created something unique and engaging in the world of superhero fiction. 

But my inspiration still had some growth to come. 

Imagine the confusion and prosaic mush created when I started exploring for work of the great pulp and pulp-adjacent writers as I tried my hand at some New Pulp Fiction stories thanks to some introductions by friends like Bobby Nash. To do my homework at writing pulpy tales, I dug into the stories (both novels and short stories) of folks like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, among others. 

With these new influences, my style took another shift. The simple prose of Hemingway was still similar to the simple, direct prose of Chandler, but the types of stories were suddenly allowed to become a lot more, well, more exciting physically and emotionally rather than just the intellectual excitement of my Literary focus.

This began a new phase of what Derrick Ferguson and I often called Literary Pulp. For us, that meant deeper than mere surface characterization, dialogue that does more than just advance the plot, and looking for real-world interactions that didn't sugarcoat the time periods we were writing about. For me, it was just a continuation of what I had been doing since discovering Lewis and Hemingway. Lewis made me want to deal with spiritual and philosophical topics in genre fiction. Hemingway made me want to create characters who, when they spoke about a topic or when they avoided a topic, revealed a lot about who they were. Same uniform, just a different ballfield.

Nourishing Corn on My Own Plot of Ground

Okay. So what did I learn through that journey toward becoming Sean Taylor, the writer? Are there lessons that can help other writers push through their own journeys from imitation to what Emerson called "self-reliance"?

Sure. If you know me at all, you already know I love both tutorials and lists, and when I get to put them together in a single article, I'm suddenly the happiest little clam in the world. 

So here goes...

1. Embrace your idols. 

It's okay to be inspired to imitate. We learn by copying the works of those we enjoy reading. Their stories teach us about story structure, how to write dialog, when to break grammar rules -- all those wonderful techniques that ultimately fill up our writing toolkit and become what we call a personal style and voice. 

Take those inspirations. Work with them. Play with them. Turn them upside down and inside out. Put your own spin on them. Play with all your favorite toys. 

2. There can't only be one. 

Now, here's the trick, isn't it? This is your journey to discovering who you are as a writer, not a rehash of the movie Highlander. 

Imitating a single writer makes you a copycat. Imitation several at once makes you a dedicated learner of the craft. The more you learn from multiple writers, the more you integrate seemingly disparate voices into your own work, and that makes you become unique. Even if you use all the same ingredients, you bake your pie from a different recipe. 

3. Start purging. 

There will be lots of tidbits and style doodads that you find no longer work for you the more comfortable you become in your own writer "skin." That's all part of learning. What doesn't work anymore, excise it. Purge it like last month's leftovers. Eventually, you are left with the style stuff that makes you happy and makes you, well, you. 

Just like I left behind the British-isms of Lewis, you may need to cull the standard adventure motif of Tolkein or Donaldson's ten pages of how brown the mountains and tunnels were. You may need to cull the reliance on the internal monologue you copied from Faulkner. You may need to ditch the sudden shifts in verb tense and -person you picked up from Ed McBain. They may have gotten you to where you are, but they no longer suit you.

4. Good writers borrow. Great writers steal. 

This quote is usually attributed to the poet T.S. Eliot and it is often quoted along with a variation on it by Aaron Sorkin: “Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” Regardless of who said it when and how, it's absolutely true. 

Beginning writers obsess about how much their work may remind them of the folks they admire. Great and practiced writers stop caring after a while. In fact, it's safe to say that all those things you think you will be called out for copying won't even register with most readers. Sure, there will always be reviewers who are paid to make both fair and unfair comparisons, but those are your typical readers. 

Steal proudly. Steal broadly. Steal without any discrimination. Do you like the way Eudora Welty writes winter scenes? Fine. Take it and shove it in your toolkit. Really dig the way Chandler can chop dialogue into snappy fragments? Chisel it right out of his book and hang onto it for your next story. 

New in Nature

Now, before you look at that list above and start to craft a plan, stop. Those aren't steps in a printout from Mapquest in 2006. You don't aim for step one and then turn off Highway 20 onto step two like it's some kind of organized plan. 

What is it then?

It's a synopsis of what happens to us as writers. It's a description of the process more than an outline to follow. It's something organic, not ordained. Something passive, not planned. 

It's one thing to be aware of it and acknowledge it and not let it consume you with imposter syndrome. But it's another thing entirely to see it as a roadmap for your writing goals. That shift in thinking is both subtle and crucial. 

The next line in the Emerson quote that started this essay is this: 

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Ultimately it comes down to this: TRY.

Enjoy what you enjoy and let it shape you as a writer. Read, consume, mulch it in your mind, turn it into brain food, rinse and repeat. It's really as simple and as complicated as that. 

Sunday Funnies: Six Word Story

 

Motivational Monday: Drilling and Blasting

 

[Link] How the Paperback Novel Changed Popular Literature

Editor's Note: An oldie but a goodie.

=======================

by Anne Trubek

Classic writers reached the masses when Penguin paperbacks began publishing great novels for the cost of a pack of cigarettes

The story about the first Penguin paperbacks may be apocryphal, but it is a good one. In 1935, Allen Lane, chairman of the eminent British publishing house Bodley Head, spent a weekend in the country with Agatha Christie. Bodley Head, like many other publishers, was faring poorly during the Depression, and Lane was worrying about how to keep the business afloat. While he was in Exeter station waiting for his train back to London, he browsed shops looking for something good to read. He struck out. All he could find were trendy magazines and junky pulp fiction. And then he had a “Eureka!” moment: What if quality books were available at places like train stations and sold for reasonable prices—the price of a pack of cigarettes, say?

Lane went back to Bodley Head and proposed a new imprint to do just that. Bodley Head did not want to finance his endeavor, so Lane used his own capital. He called his new house Penguin, apparently upon the suggestion of a secretary, and sent a young colleague to the zoo to sketch the bird. He then acquired the rights to ten reprints of serious literary titles and went knocking on non-bookstore doors. When Woolworth’s placed an order for 63,500 copies, Lane realized he had a viable financial model.

Lane’s paperbacks were cheap. They cost two and a half pence, the same as ten cigarettes, the publisher touted. Volume was key to profitability; Penguin had to sell 17,000 copies of each book to break even.

The first ten Penguin titles, including The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy Sayers, were wildly successful, and after just one year in existence, Penguin had sold over three million copies.

Read the full article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-the-paperback-novel-changed-popular-literature-11893941/

[Link] Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, the Art of Revision, and His Reading List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”

by Maria Popova

“As a writer you should not judge. You should understand,” Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) counseled in his 1935 Esquire compendium of writing advice, addressed to an archetypal young correspondent but based on a real-life encounter that had taken place a year earlier.

In 1934, a 22-year-old aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson set out to meet his literary hero, hoping to steal a few moments with Hemingway to talk about writing. The son of Norwegian immigrant wheat farmers, he had just completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but had refused to pay the $5 diploma fee. Convinced that his literary education would be best served by apprenticing himself to Hemingway, however briefly, he hitchhiked atop a coal car from Minnesota to Key West. “It seemed a damn fool thing to do,” Samuelson later recalled, “but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn’t have to have much reason for what he did.” Unreasonable though the quest may have been, he ended up staying with Hemingway for almost an entire year, over the course of which he became the literary titan’s only true protégé.

Samuelson recorded the experience and its multitude of learnings in a manuscript that was only discovered by his daughter after his death in 1981. It was eventually published as With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba (public library) — the closest thing to a psychological profile.

Read the full article: https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/01/04/with-hemingway-arnold-samuelson-writing/

[Link] Hemingway’s Tough-Love Letter of Advice to F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing and Turning Suffering into Creative Fuel

“Forget your personal tragedy… Good writers always come back. Always.”

by Maria Popova

In the spring of 1934, just before dispensing his finest advice on writing and ambition to an aspiring writer who had hitchhiked atop a coal car across the country to see him, Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) received a request for input by a writer far less unknown: his old pal F. Scott Fitzgerald. Despite their divergent politics and worldviews, the two had become fast friends a decade earlier and corresponded with uncommon candor about their convictions, their struggles, and the intricacies of their common craft.

Fitzgerald, who had taken a nine-year addiction-aided hiatus from publishing after the success of The Great Gatsby, had just released Tender Is the Night and was turning to his old friend for feedback. Hemingway did not hold back — he fired a missile of tough love not nearly as polite as Beckett’s, not nearly as intellectually elegant as Margaret Fuller’s, and yet absolutely brilliant and brimming with sobering advice for any writer.

Read the full article: https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/21/hemingway-f-scott-fitzgerald-letter-advice

Motivational Monday: Leave a Little in the Well

Motivational Monday: People, Not Characters

 

[LInk] Writer Needs: An Island, a Tower, and a Cat

by Dana Mentink

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Um, bleed, Mr. Hemingway? Those are not words that inspire the creative spirit. Granted, we all aren’t penning Nobel Prize-worthy fiction, but there must be something the aspiring writer can take away from the life of this literary icon, aside from the need to give up a pint or two of our life’s blood.

When I think of Hemingway, it takes me to a tropical island which is deeply entwined with my own family’s experience. Instead of bleeding onto the page, let’s take a little jaunt over to Cuba, climb up a tower, and hang out with some cats, why don’t we? Here’s the first inspiration from Hemingway’s tropical lifestyle.

Find yourself an island. Lovingly known as ‘Papa’ to the Cuban people, Hemingway moved to the island in 1940 and stayed there for twenty years. My father and mother both shared the same island home. Dad’s father, born in Guantanamo, moved the family from Central Ermita to Matahambre to Santa Lucia as his work shifted from the sugar mills to the copper mine. Like Hemingway, my parents basked in the exceptional warmth of the Cuban people, the beauty of a Caribbean paradise. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect locale for a writer to pen that magnum opus?

But nothing is perfect, is it? Suddenly there was Castro and the beautiful things were stripped away until all that was left for my father’s family was the contents of their suitcases as they fled the revolution, my mother’s side having escaped a bit earlier. Hemingway left his island home too, never to return, dying by his own hand in Idaho a year later.

So what if that idyllic writing locale is not to be? Then we must find a more mundane place for our dreams and stories. For my parents, it led them to the golden California sunshine. This noisy suburbia is home for me too, no sand, no surf, just traffic and leaf blowers, but the words get written just the same. No island, no problem. Life is a series of adjustments, after all.

Read the full article: https://strandmag.com/writer-needs-an-island-a-tower-and-a-cat/

#MotivationalMonday -- Learning from the Masters

[Link] Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

by Mike Springer

Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction.  He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hemingway on Writing. We've selected seven of our favorite quotations from the book and placed them, along with our own commentary, on this page. We hope you will all--writers and readers alike--find them fascinating.

1: To get started, write one true sentence.

Hemingway had a simple trick for overcoming writer's block. In a memorable passage in A Moveable Feast, he writes:

Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.

Read the full article: http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/seven_tips_from_ernest_hemingway_on_how_to_write_fiction.html

#MotivationalMonday (Finishing Strong)

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #304 -- Why I Write (Revised and Made Honest)

What's the real reason you write?

The real reason I write is perhaps more existential than esoteric, I suppose. It has more in common with Hemingway's hero of mere endurance than with a romantic notion of being a conduit for fictional tales.

I write because I am vain enough to believe that not only do my words and my stories have meaning and importance and value now, but also will have meaning and importance and value to future generations. Writing is not just an act of creative indulgence but an act of profound pride. I own up to that.

Enough of that esoteric "I write because I have to, because these stories need an outlet and won't tell themselves" crap. I write because I plan to leave something of myself in a real, physical sense when I am gone from this world. I write because I believe that I mattered, and that I will continue to matter after I'm dead.

I write to prove to the world I was, am, and will continue to be here.

Nuggets #17 -- Hemingway's Wisdom

One thing I've learned is that the longer I write and the more I write, the better my early drafts become, but they're still pretty much exactly what Papa Hemingway called 'em.