Wednesday, March 25, 2009

It Was Hemingway, I Think

I've always been fascinated by what writers have to say about writing, actors about acting, directors about directing. But I can think of only one good piece of advice I ever gleaned from all those interviews. It was Hemingway, I think, who said something like: The trick is to stop writing while you know what's going to happen next.

5 comments:

Tom Manoff said...

Of course he killed himself.

Billy Glad said...

Yes. Apparently, he knew what was going to happen next and decided on a different ending. I've often wondered how one gets to that place.

Tom Manoff said...

Maybe Live Wire whispered in his ear, "Hey, old guy. Is that Old Man and the Sea the best you can offer up? I took down the Titanic as an appetizer, tamed Pluto and unleashed those banshee Sirens a singing, and I'm currently melting the North and South Polar Ice Caps. Ahab makes your old man seem....

well, even Live Wire has manners.

Decidere said...

Gabriel GarcĂ­a-Marquez used to meet his buddies in the evening and tell them what he'd been writing that day, how his book was progressing. At the end of a year when the book came out, his friends were amazed that it had nothing to do with what he'd been telling them.

Billy Glad said...

The process is esoteric. I think the danger of talking your work away is real. blogging it away maybe. Writing is so solitary. You put a little group like this together and it fills some gaps. Finding balance isn't easy.

I was thinking more about the kind of talking about what you're doing and what other people are doing that's helpful when I was thinking about Hemingway.

I haven't had a writing career, so I've only bumped into a couple of editors. Never met one personally. By bumping into them, I mean fleeting reactions to my work.

The first was a long time ago, when I was a kid and wrote my first short story. I sent it to Esquire. A real literary magazine in those days. My college roommate's mother, a literary lady, thought I should send it to the little journals first and wait for big mags to discover me, but I went ahead and sent it to Esquire. I got it back with a note from an editor named Rust Hills. The note said: Sorry, but we decided, finally, that this was too melodramatic. That nicely place "finally" is one of the finest, kindest and most civil words I ever read.

The second reaction was a couple of years ago when an editor friend of a friend read an early draft of Flutterby and sent me a note, saying he liked the quirkiness of Julian's character, but that Flutterby wasn't a book yet.