Writing No Matter What

Writing in spite of all that seeks to erode that sacred time and space is a feat. To write requires a mental fortress be put up in the face of storms, salesmen of all sorts hawking somebody else's passion, bright sun shining days that lure the soul to play and even against the writer herself - so willing to give in to self-doubt or procrastination, the evil twins.

It makes me think of Saint Teresa of Avila. She wrote an amazing account of the journey of her soul in search of the ultimate truth. (Well, isn't that why we write?) In Interior Castles St. Teresa described seven rooms within the castle of the soul, each a kind of stage where the soul gets to know itself, a layer of interfering thoughts peeled away to a shiny new surface...tender, potent.

Guarding the fortress of time and space is a similar process for a writer who with ferocity, ever alert to threats, sets out to prob his heart and to sing his song. Therefore writers aquire quirks. "No thank you, I will be writing all day on Saturday" is a statement not well received by the world out there. Yet everyone depends on the writer doing just that: waging a kind of war with the exterior flotsam of things, voices, paper, emails, god-awful news and edgy relationships. The dog that needs to go out. The phone that rings. The taxes that....

I write because writing clarifies my feelings and organizes my universe and on one golden hued day I sometimes even write something someone else might want to read. But regardless, I write anyway.

Susan

Hemmingway's Compound Sentence

I am learning that a writer reads.

Revisiting Hemmingway this month I was impressed again with the clean language and his use of the compound sentence. Here is a good example from Islands in the Stream, Chapter 1:

"The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream."

To me his writing emanates from very organized thinking, first this fact, then this one and then the logical one after that so the reader follows naturally and easily along with the storyteller.

Chapter Eight, the greatest fishing description I have ever read, includes this: "The boy's brown back was arched, the rod bent, the line moved slowly on the surface, and a quarter of a mile below the great fish was swimming."

Which also reminds me that we are most powerful as writers when we write about what we know. Hemmingway was a great sport fisherman. He lived in Cuba and knew the Gulf Waters very well. Old Man and the Sea is a testament to Hemmingway's many years on the sea and his love of the people of the sea.

In this photo, Hemmingway has netted a tuna off the Bimini Islands, the place where his main character, Thomas Hudson, lives and paints in Islands in the Stream.

Reread Hemmingway to learn the art of unvarnished language and the power of a good story, well told.

Write well and happily my friends! ~Susan