As my friends and cohorts prepare for the Rocket City Marathon (start=7 a.m.), I find myself wishing I had signed up. But then I remember that I don't like running long distances on roads. I much prefer trails. I came across this blog that explains the difference pretty well: http://througharunninglens.blogspot.com/2012/08/road-vstrail-marathon-its-mental-thing.html 

Here's to all runners, no matter the venue or the difference!

Hemingway on Writing

In a 1958 interview with George Plimpton, Earnest Hemingway answers questions with some gems worth repeating. I am listing them here for my own easy reference and for anyone else who happens upon this blog.

 

• When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.
• 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.
• The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.
• The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.
• Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out. Everything changes as it moves. That is what makes the movement which makes the story. Sometimes the movement is so slow it does not seem to be moving. But there is always change and always movement.
• For Whom the Bell Tolls was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.
• Some [characters] come from real life. Mostly you invent people from a knowledge and understanding and experience of people.
• If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen. If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
• ...how I was trying to learn in Chicago in around 1920 and was searching for the unnoticed things that made emotions, such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell, the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter’s flat-soled gym shoes, the gray color of Jack Blackburn’s skin when he had just come out of stir, and other things I noted as a painter sketches. You saw Blackburn’s strange color and the old razor cuts and the way he spun a man before you knew his history. These were the things which moved you before you knew the story.
• From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of.

 

Here is the interview in full: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway

 

 

This is me and my dog Annie.

I first met Annie when she was a very sick little puppy. Someone had dumped her unceremoniously on the side of the road, and she had somehow staggered her way onto the nearest porch. Her temporary haven belonged to my neighbor – a large, loud man with a big heart but no great love for dogs.  His adopted daughter, age 7, had called me over as I walked by their house. I was just cooling down after a Saturday morning run. 

"Have you lost a puppy?"  she asked.

That was a logical question. After all, five dogs lived at my house. 

I answered no, I wasn't missing a puppy. But I just had to walk onto the porch to take a look at this one. There lay a dingy yellowish/white puppy with intense black eyes that looked at me as if to say "I am sick, but I am not afraid." When I asked the little girl's father (aforementioned loud man with big heart) whether he wanted to keep the porch puppy, he answered: "I was thinking of putting her in a stew." 

I said, "Well I'll take her with me then," and scooped her up. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I walked around the neighborhood carrying her to see if we could find her owner. No one claimed her, and I was glad. Of course, I only knocked on two doors. But I did put an ad in the paper. Again, no one claimed her. 

Thus begins a wonderful story spanning the 13 ½ years of one special dog's life. In our  time together, Annie and I saw each other through hard times and celebrated good times. We shared life in all its pain and glory. This is a story I need to tell because Annie was so special -- and my best friend.

To be continued....