At FC’s suggestion, I’m reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

“Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over.”

How curious to begin a book with “then.” It implies that something has come before.


Hemingway on writing

His cure for his writer’s block: “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.’ So finally I would write one true sentences, 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.”
So, what’s a true sentence? Something that’s simple, declarative and what?

“… I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything… and I would read so that I would not think about work and make myself impotent to do it.”
I hope that my subconscious will work overnight. I sometimes find myself consciously grappling with an article topic, trying to grasp its essence.

About Gertrude Stein: “But she disliked the drudgery of revision and the obligation to make her writing intelligible.” I’m with GS on the first half of that sentence. I do try to make my work intelligible, but I have a hard time reading my text through other’s eyes.

“… you could omit anything if you know that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.” Consciously deciding to omit things is important.