[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/

Movie Reviews for Writers -- The Nesting

This haunted house thriller features a house that used to be a brothel and is now haunted by the ghosts of the former prostitutes. One that level it's a serviceable flick with plenty of scares. 

But what I'm interested in is the story of the agoraphobic writer who rents the house because the city is too terrifying for her and it is affecting her ability to complete her new manuscript. 

The biggest statement about the writer's life in The Nesting is that of the environment needed for a writer to work. Outside the ghost story, Lauren is unable to write in the wrong environment. Too much stimulation and her task becomes far more difficult and sometimes impossible. But when she moves away from other stimuli and rents the lonely house in the middle of nowhere, she can relax and let the words flow. 

This is something I've experienced myself. When I needed to really pound out a 40k word count for a deadline job, I took a week off from work and traveled to the house that used to belong to my MeMe and set up my laptop in the bay window. Or on the front porch. Two bottles of my dad's Dragon's Blood wine and a week on the keyboard in the country and 40k words flowed like I'd never seen them flow before. 

Still, most writers I know tend to have places where they write best, be it at a coffee shop, libray, home office, back porch, etc. -- without having to take off on a vacation to the middle of nowhere.