Taboo's critical literary discussions about Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Franz Kafka, and many other authors. Links to full story texts and critical discussions.
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.
--A Moveable Feast
The Writer's Process:
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen
next. If you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every
day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.
--By-Line: Ernest Hemingway
It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love
with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty,
it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do
it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop
when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at
night from the springs that fed it.
--A Moveable Feast
Our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are
caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and
they write slop. It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write
when there is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then,
once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop. Or else they
read critics.
--Green Hills of Africa
A long time ago I found it was bad to discuss work you are engaged on. I know it does not
work that way with all writers. But that is the way it works with me. It is not followed
to be rude nor to be mysterious. It is a system of working.
--From New York Times Book Review (July 31, 1949), as
printed in Conversations with Ernest Hemingway
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to
see, you dull the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and
know I had to put it to the grindstone again and again and hammer it into shape and put a
whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and
shining, and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.
--Hemingway's Preface to The Short Stories: The First
Forty-Nine Stories with a Brief Preface by the Author
Quick Notes:
Site in Progess
Thanks for your Patience.
Just a Trial Page
posted by: surrogate (reply)
post date: 05.25.06 (3:17 am)
I love the bottom paragraph.
I'm one who will sometimes talk about small parts of whatever I'm working on with a couple of select people - perhaps because they listen constructively and sometimes provide me with different ways to look at things, which for me can be extremely helpful.
