A few writing tips from today’s newsletter:
1. I am deep into writing at the moment and I keep repeating to myself: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now. It just needs to exist.”
2. “Better stop short than fill to the brim,” says the Tao Te Ching. Also helping the writing this week is Hemingway’s advice: “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day… you will never be stuck.”
You can read the rest here.
Water is always on one’s mind in Texas. We are in a bad drought down here, but luckily, for me, for once, the drought is literal and not metaphorical.
Some Hemingway (from his Paris Review interview), courtesy of George Saunders:
Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are spent on the actual writing. A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.
And elsewhere:
I learned 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.
Hemingway here is talking about subtraction — John McPhee talks about the addition:
If somebody says to me, You’re a prolific writer—it seems so odd. It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.
(All emphasis mine.)
Plumbing issues are usually matters of input and output.
“Every writer is every writer they’ve loved and quarrelled with who came before, as every parent is every parent they loved and quarrelled with.”
—Hilton Als
Watching Ken Burns’ Hemingway, I was reminded of the great Elmore Leonard, who said, “I used to read a lot of him till I learned he had no sense of humor.”
He expanded this thought in a Fresh Air interview:
I had studied Hemingway so closely and learned a lot, but I didn’t agree with his attitude about life, about himself. He took everything, himself, everything so seriously. And, your style comes out of your attitude — what kind of a person you are, you know, your personality, how you see things. Are you optimistic? Are you funny? Are you grim? What? This is all out of your attitude. And once I learned that, then I had to find other writers to study and imitate.
This is an old, old story: the student imitates the master, learns what they can, but then has to move on (often to imitating someone else) if they’re to find their own thing.
This jumping of influences usually happens over and over — Billy Collins says your voice usually comes from copying a half dozen other writers and becoming a blend. (And Hemingway himself once said, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”)
As I kept watching the documentary, it was emphasized over and over again by the talking heads how influential Hemingway is, how impossible it is for writers not to be influenced by Hemingway. (Once again, our grammar of influence seems to me inadequate. We talk about influence backwards.) It got me thinking I’d watch a whole documentary about writers talking about how they got themselves out from under the influence of their writer heroes.
Another favorite writer of mine who talks about getting out from under the influence of Hemingway is George Saunders. In several talks, he’s talked about being a young man and having a “medical condition called a ‘Hemingway-Boner.’” He describes his early stories as going something like, “Nick walked into the Wal-Mart. It was pleasant.”
In a Talk at Google, Saunders explained that if a writer is lucky, they get to a point where they realize that the voice that they’re imitating simply can’t cover their own worldview. A new voice is needed. “That is a holy moment for a young writer,” Saunders says, “when you start getting full body impatient with your mentor.”
Like Leonard, Saunders discovered that his own comedic worldview didn’t match Hemingway’s more tragic one:
What I got tired of in Hemingway was that he, in his later work especially, he wasn’t funny. He didn’t have any sense of humor actually. He knew very well who the noble, interesting people were and so on.
And my life was not — I never lived a Hemingwayesque moment really.
I remember as a young kid coming out of a funeral– a very sad, terrible thing. But the funeral was being held in a mock Georgian mansion—one of those mansions that had been put up just to be a funeral parlor.
And then you walk out of that, and everyone’s crying and it’s terrible. And across the street, there’s a Chuck E Cheese. And the mouse is on break. And he’s on the side of the building with his head off. And he’s smoking.
So that moment could not show up in Hemingway. He couldn’t do it. He had a stylistic cave he had made for himself.
And I thought, that’s where the gateway to style is. And when you see something in your life, in your heart, in your world that the style of your hero can’t accommodate, then it’s a time for growth.
Or, as Brancusi put it, when he left Rodin’s studio, “Nothing grows under big trees.”
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