Here’s Hemingway’s advice to writers:
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
All you have to do?
Hah!
It’s no trifle, I tell you that.
Sometimes it takes hours before you can write one true sentence (also why Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times before he was satisfied), but once you get that one true sentence, you’ll find the rest of it flows freely.
One true sentence is like Anne Lamott’s “bird by bird”.
Tasked with a school project in which she had to catalogue lots of different birds, and finding herself overwhelmed with it all, she was the fortunate receiver of her father’s wisdom in response to the question, “where do I start?” in which he tells her to simply go bird by bird.
It’s laying a brick in the foundation of a wall.
Once you’ve laid that one brick and you’re happy with it, you lay another.
And another.
Someday you look up and see the Taj Mahal.
Some think the best way to lay bricks is slowly, making sure each is perfect.
You’d think Hemingway would fall into this camp with his “one true sentence” advice, but I suspect Hemingway cranked out his numbers at breakneck speed.
He was a journalist and got paid by the word.
Those thirty-nine useless drafts of the ending of A Farewell to Arms, either flew into the trashcan across an enjoyable afternoon at the typewriter, or they never existed at all and Hemingway just wanted to make fun of the interviewer, troll him a bit, or offer something pithy that sounds “writer-like”.
Hemingway was, by all accounts, a boorish drunk whose company we likely would have detested.
A writer we would have rather enjoyed wine and dinner with would be the late great Ray Bradbury.
Bradbury was the ultimate energetic writer.
He compelled budding writers to have multiple passions, to leap from their bed early in the morning, and explode like a rocket across the page (then spend the afternoon cleaning it up).
In his later years, Bradbury envied the young and mused on what he would do with youth (so often squandered on the young) – he would have written a poem a day, a short story a week, and a novel a month.
Imagine!
Imagine writing such volume!
Many equate quick writing with bad writing, but this is absolutely not the case.
This is just the case according to frustrated failed writers and low-grade high-school teachers.
We don’t all have to be Proust!
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (one of my favourites) in a white-hot heat of three days.
Jack Kerouac spent thirty years on the road and thirty days typing it all up.
And Bradbury wrote some really poignant, life-changing works of beauty in one afternoon.
Trust your instincts.
Write fast.
As fast as your fingers will allow, so your inner- censor and inner-judge can’t keep up and get in your way.
Pipeline your muse straight from soul to page.
Clean it up later if you like.
But always trust that you are an artist and you know best.
Anyways, what else did Bradbury advise?
He recommended young writers read one poem, one short story, and one essay every night before bed for 1,000 nights. Because your head will be full of stuff!
This is a recipe for creativity.
For sure, writing is hard.
Or it can be.
Ian Fleming used to lock himself up in a second-rate hotel for two weeks and pump out a Bond novel.
He couldn’t wait to return to his normal life.
Though it makes me wonder why one would persist if it’s that unpleasant.
I find writing hard, but I couldn’t imagine living without it.
So best to set up some rituals to support it, because writing certainly supports my life and it’s only fair.
I know Dickens used to go on long rambling walks across London before sitting down to pen Bleak House and Great Expectations.
And Haruki Murakami would train for a marathon alongside each novel he wrote.
His life became a hypnotic trance of run, write, sleep, run, write, sleep, until he was fully immersed in his fictional world and six months later he had a new PB for his marathon career and a brand spanking new novel.
I don’t want to be a writer.
I feel that I must.
Have you dusted off your Plato’s Republic recently?
I came across this line just the other day:
the less keen the would-be rulers of a community are to rule, the better and less divided the administration of that community is bound to be.
And immediately extrapolated the political lesson to the educational sphere too.
Then, serendipitously, I tucked into the continual conversation I’ve had across the years with Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and found this gem:
I turned my back upon the rulers when I saw what they now call ruling: bartering and haggling for power – with the rabble!
I don’t much care for Plato, though I do agree with him about much.
I find myself agreeing a lot more with Nietzsche, entirely with John Stuart Mill, and an overwhelming amount with Aristotle.
Aristotle is particularly good for artists and writers because he implores us to remember that we are what we habitually do.