A Plan Forms

It’s time to get serious. I have been writing on and off quite a bit. I have four or five novels in the works, none of which I’m working on nearly enough and none of which are anywhere close to finished, but they’re all good in their own right and I have goals. I want to be a novelist. I want to write for a living. It’s important to me to get there.

And I’m fat again. It’s mostly not my fault. The weight I gained over the past few years was a direct result of my birth control, but now that I’ve had that removed, I need to take control and lose it. I started out well with that yesterday. I planned a full day of healthy eating and I walked and jogged more than four miles after work. Then I went to a friend’s house and ate this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this morning, I nearly got sick in the shower (if you’ve ever experienced morning sickness, it felt like that) and then a pair of pants that fit me fine last year wouldn’t even come close to buttoning. Yeah. That happened.

But no worries because even before the truffle/cheesecake incident, during my workout, I had formed a plan in my mind. I am going to remedy all my woes.

First, I will go to the gym three times a week to lift weights. On the days I go to the gym, I will do some sort of cardio exercise to round out a full hour and on the days I don’t go, I will do a full hour of cardio. I will also do at least thirty minutes of yoga every day. I will write for a minimum of one hour per day and I will read a book each week. I mean, I started the book review blog before my surgery and I feel like I wrote two great reviews and was on a roll and then … I stopped. And that isn’t OK with me. I have big plans for that blog. It has a theme and a purpose and it’s pretty. It’s time to get serious.

 

 

 

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I Should Just Rename this Blog After Him

The Hemingways in Pamplona with friends during the trip that inspired The Sun Also Rises.

As the Hemingway Turns …

When I last left you all, I was in the middle of reading The Paris Wife (see previous posts for reference). I’ve since finished that, read The Sun Also Rises in about two days and am at this writing about 125 pages into Hemingway by Kenneth Lynn, a 600-plus page biography that got pretty good reviews on Amazon.

First I want to amend my thoughts on The Paris Wife. While I stand by what I said, that last maybe quarter of the book was incredible. It should have been the majority of the story instead of such a small part. The emotional pain Hadley experiences at the end of her marriage, facing the fact that Ernest chose his mistress over his family, all of it was heartbreaking. I bawled like a baby over it. It’s one of those literary moments that haunts people for life. It made up for the other 75 percent of the book, which was only so-so and I probably wouldn’t have continued reading if I wasn’t a writer fascinated by Hemingway’s processes. Based on that last 25 percent, I recommend the book. Plus, it was a best-seller so I’m probably in the minority in my disappointment. I generally am.

I moved on from there to Sun. I chose it for my foray into the world of Ernest Hemingway because it fit with Paris. During his time in Paris, while married to Hadley, they went annually to the Pamplona running of the bulls festival and attended bull fights (I won’t get into my thoughts on that cruel barbarity). During one of those trips, several friends joined them. There is a photograph from that trip that I come across often when doing my google searches to help educate myself about the history of this man that comes up often of the small group sitting in a cafe in Pamplona.

Sun is about that trip. He changed some names and a few details and left his wife entirely out of the story, but otherwise, it’s about those people and that trip. And it is not flattering! I think maybe he left Hadley out because he loved her and the characters in that book are just … awful. In the end, he gave all the royalties from the book to Hadley so I guess in the end, she got to be part of the story.

Sun isn’t considered Hemingway’s greatest work and it was a strange book in that there really was no plot. Or maybe a very weak plot that the reader has to kind of search out. It was just a story about a series of events that happened to this group of people. But I still enjoyed it on a certain level. Almost like a course in creative writing without having to sit in a classroom.

I’m discovering how very much I have in common with this man. It’s all very strange. I’ve always said that my time as a journalist was the best thing that ever happened to my creative writing style. The quick, active, short way one must write newspaper articles — getting to the point quickly and using limited space to convey a vast amount of information — translates excellently into short story and novel-writing. One learns to not waste words or over-describe. Turns out, Hemingway learned the exact same lesson in the exact same way I did. He began his writing career in journalism and he learned to write fiction by emulating the journalistic style.

I hate to compare myself to him because he’s considered so widely to be one of the best writers in history and especially of the twentieth century and I haven’t even published a short story. Maybe I’m arrogant in my comparison, but I see so much of my style in his. I see the writer I maybe am not yet but want to be some day. There is a reason he keeps popping up in my life lately. I firmly believe that.

Hemingway was born and spent his early childhood in this house in Oak Park, Illinois.

But the similarities don’t end with the writing style. His biography goes into descriptions of the home in which he was born (his maternal grandparents’ home) and the one his parents built after his grandfather’s death. I had to look them both up and found that his birth home, aside from the color, is exactly the house I picture in my head that features prominently in one of the novels I’m writing. It’s a Victorian with a cupola and a wrap-around porch.

But I’m not mean enough to write as he did. In his early days he didn’t even bother changing people’s names in the stories he wrote about them. At one point in the biography, Lynn says that Hemingway’s favorite nickname in high school was “Hemingstein” because he was “enough of an anti-Semite” to find it funny to make fun of Jewish names.

That made me pretty angry. I started thinking that I should stop reading his work. It made me wonder why he’s so beloved. But then I pulled back and remembered that Gertrude Stein was his very close friend and mentor and also godmother to his first child. And later in the book, it turns out he dated a Jewish girl when he returned from World War I. And then I started thinking about how he wrote about people who were supposed to be his friends and how he treated people who went out of their way to help him (who were not Jewish) and I realized that Hemingway just didn’t like anyone.

This post has been kind of rambling and it’s really just becoming a commentary of my thoughts as I read and learn, so there’s no good way to end it. I will just say … Until next time. Hopefully by then I’ll have finished the biography and read a couple more Hemingway books. The Old Man and the Sea is up next, but that’s only 125 pages, so I’ll probably finish it in a day.

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Lessons from Paris

Although a work of historical fiction, my understanding of The Paris Wife is that it’s pretty historically accurate. It’s supposed to be about Hadley Richardson, but to be honest, I’m not finding her to be all that interesting and I haven’t really been loving the book.

Still, I keep reading.

I keep reading not because the story of Hadley and Ernest Hemingway is compelling or interesting or exciting — it’s not. I keep reading not because author Paula McLain paints a beautiful, compelling picture of the places and people she writes about — she doesn’t. I keep reading because of the details about Hemingway’s writing process.

I’m learning from this book that I’m normal. I’m learning that maybe my inability to produce a great work of literature is not a lack of talent but a lack of the proper life circumstances.

Ernest Hemingway could not produce fiction while holding a job. He could not concentrate and write in his own home. He needed to be free of obligations and free of reminders of responsibility in order to produce the work for which he is famous. I see myself so much in the portrait McLain paints of Hemingway and while it could be disheartening (since there’s no way that any time soon I will be able to quit my job and move to Europe to do nothing but write) it makes me feel better. It makes me feel as though I’m maybe not alone in this solitary endeavor. It makes me feel like it will happen someday.

I can’t do what he did. But knowing the problem is half the battle. Now I need to devise a plan and fix it.

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Yeah, I’m Gonna Talk Hemingway Again

Hadley and Ernest

He just keeps coming up, over and over. I’ve given in.

I edited a children’s story a friend wrote and as a thank you she sent me a gift card to Barnes and Noble. Then another friend gave me the same thing as a birthday gift. I finally made my trip there on Sunday because I knew exactly what I wanted.

Renee over at Motherhood, Music and Beer recommended I read The Paris Wife — she loved it and, well, it’s an historical novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage from his wife’s, Hadley Richardson Hemingway’s, point of view. So I got that and two Hemingway books: The Old Man and the Sea because it’s really short and The Sun Also Rises because it’s about his marriage to Hadley* and thought it would be a good follow-up to The Paris Wife.

Also on Renee’s advice, I rented Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris. In that movie, Owen Wilson’s character, Gil, is a screenplay writer on vacation in Paris with his fiancée and her parents. A lot of the movie is classic Woody. But the main plot is what made the movie for me: Gil goes for a walk through the city and sits down on some steps just as the clock strikes midnight. An old-fashioned car pulls up and several men beckon Gil to get in and ride with them. He does and the vehicle transports him to the 1920s where he meets, well, everyone who was anyone in the literary world in Paris in the 1920s, including of course Ernest Hemingway.

And so it goes and so it goes. I’m about sixty pages into The Paris Wife. So far, I’m not loving it. But reading Hemingway’s words about writing — about his writing — is eye-opening for me. I think I’m starting to understand why this man, this writer, this legend is haunting me.

*The book jacket for Paris made me think this, but turns out this is not the case. The book is about something that happened while Ernest and Hadley were married, but he left her character out altogether.

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Hemingway, Earnestly

Ernest Hemingway 1957 by Yousuf Karsh

He’s everywhere! He’s everywhere!

I never got much into Ernest Hemingway’s writing. He was never one to interest me. I’ve been to his house. Well, outside of his house. The line was long and I had limited time, so the tour did not happen. I was not disappointed.

Now I think  I should have gone in. Mr. Hemingway is stalking me this week. I’m sure it must mean something. It started on Sunday, New Year’s Day. My friend Leslee, to raise money for her church youth group and to share in a yearly ritual, hosted a vision-boarding and meditation retreat. I’d done this twice before, though not with Leslee leading. I’ll write more about that later this week, but this part could not wait.

A vision board, in short, is a collage. The one done on New Years Day is supposed to intuitively inform the year to come. One begins by flipping through magazines and finding photos and words that jump out and ask to be included on the board. I went through probably twenty magazines. Out of one, I pulled a furniture advertisement in which the featured room looked like a place I would be very happy. From another, I pulled a photograph of a grey tabby cat. As most of my readers know, I do love cats. There’s something spiritual about them.

I set these images aside as I continued searching magazines and finally, when I was ready to start putting my collage together, I went back to my images to trim them up pretty and arrange them on the board.

Hemingway with one of his famous six-toed cats.

That’s when I noticed.

At first, it was just that in the upper right corner of the furniture ad, it said, “The Earnest Hemingway Collection.” I thought nothing of it as I snipped that off. It wasn’t the part of the photo that I wanted for my board. I didn’t throw it away right away because I wasn’t near a trash can. Good thing.

I came to the photo of the cat, which was attached to a photo of a butterfly that I’d also liked. The caption for both photos was in the corner of the butterfly photo. I was about to snip that off, but then I read it. The cat was one of the famous six-toed cats that live on the Hemingway Estate in Key West.

I decided to cut his name out of both photos and glue them onto my vision board. Then I decided to just wait and see what the following year holds and what the significance is of coming across his name twice like that without even realizing in the moment that I had.

And then yesterday he struck again. I went to Pinterest and began looking through the varied and really cool things the people I follow posted since I’d last looked. About halfway down the main page, I found that someone had pinned a 1957 photographic portrait of … Ernest Hemingway.

I repinned it to my own board. I didn’t even have a category under which it fit properly, but I knew I had to have it. I pinned it under “Book Ideas.” I couldn’t think of anywhere else even remotely close.

It was sign number three. And I still don’t know what it means.

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Writing and Character Development

House of the Seven Gables, Salem, Massachusetts. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

 

I discovered a post by fellow writer-blogger Alice in Waiting about writing and characters. She said she’s been told that one should write the story first and develop characters later, and that got me thinking. 

I’ve never personally heard a theory on that one way or another, but I know that a large part of my writer’s block comes from not developing characters enough. I came to that conclusion several months ago and it’s something I’ve thought about a lot and am trying to work on.  

Two weeks ago, I started reading The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Way back in my college days as an English literature major, I bought the book for a class, but we never got around to reading it. I picked it up a few years ago to read on my own and couldn’t get past the first few pages. I don’t think I was ready. I’m ready now.  

What strikes me with this book, something I’m paying closer attention to now, is Hawthorne’s description not only of personalities, but also the details of how his characters appear, physically. At the writing of this post, I’m up to chapter five, so he’s mostly focused on Hepzibah. He describes her as an elderly woman who always has a scowl, but the scowl isn’t a testament to her personality. It just is. Those who meet her within the book’s pages must get to know her as a person to get past that scowl.  

It’s that detail that brings Hepzibah alive and makes her real. It’s what draws a reader into the world Hawthorne presents. And that, I believe, is the mark of a truly great work of literary art and what I plan to achieve in my writing.

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A Blessing and a Curse

Like most people my age and older, I grew up without the Internet. When I was 16, my grandfather got Prodigy and put all of his children on his account, so that was my first foray into the world of cyberspace, but it was a far cry from what we now know as the World Wide Web.

Over the next few years, the Internet became more and more available and by the time I was 22, I lived in a house with a dial-up Internet connection and had my own e-mail account. We all know what the next eleven years entailed (yes, I’ll be 33 on December 26. Stop by and say hello!).

This marvel of modern technology allows people to stay in touch across vast distances. When I was a kid, a move to the next town led to a lot of lost friendships because it wasn’t easy to keep in touch. These days, my daughter keeps in touch with friends in three states through e-mail and Facebook (and that wonder of wonders, the cell phone. Remember when you had to wait until after 7 p.m. to make long distance phone calls and they were kept to ten minutes because it cost 10 cents a minute to talk over and above the regular phone bill?).

I’ve mentioned before in this blog that I have reconnected with old friends I never thought I’d see or hear from again. It’s been a wonderful experience. For all these reasons, I love the Internet.

But there’s a dark side. And, no, I’m not talking about what a lot of you probably think I’m talking about. That particular problem hasn’t been an issue in my life, thank goodness. No, this is a personal issue I have, and apparently I am not alone.

I had dinner a couple weeks ago with Leslee from Waiting for the Click. The subject of the Internet came up, and our discussion was about how we feel when we spend too much time online, especially doing specific things.

Like I’ve mentioned before, I have set goals for myself as far as writing and reading. I want to read a book a week (I did manage to read two in the past month and am on number three). But I tend to find ways of procrastinating on these goals, and one of those ways is to waste a lot of time online. And I don’t like it.

When I joined Weight Watchers, it was the online program. Weight Watchers Online has message boards, and of course I got sucked in. Now, I have met some of those people in real life and others have become good cyber friends. It’s almost like having hundreds of pen pals, if that makes sense.

I find, though, that the Internet, especially when it’s a place frequented by people who don’t know each other outside of that context, brings out an ugliness in people. There are people who post on that board who I sincerely hope are much nicer and more positive people when they aren’t there. And I know that sometimes I can be grumpier on that board than I ever would be if I were face to face with someone. Couple that with the fact that something you type might come across very differently if it was said in person, and people react harshly online when they might not if you were face to face.

All of that makes message boards in general very stressful places to spend one’s time.

But I do. I go there when I’m bored or procrastinating. I don’t feel good, spiritually, when I spend too much time there. I feel much better when I spend that time writing or reading. I’d rather be with friends having a lively conversation. I prefer all those things to time online. Yet I get sucked in almost daily. Because, I guess, at heart, it’s easier to be lazy.

I don’t spend gobs of time on Facebook. I will check it to see what’s happening and if I have any messages, then log off. There really isn’t anything else that takes up so much time. I do read quite a few blogs regularly now and look for new ones, but I feel enriched by that. I get inspiration from the words and writing styles of others. Somehow, I need the strength and wherewithal to just never even open that website again.

Brain candy is nice sometimes. But I should be spending more time doing things that make me feel alive and fewer things that make my teeth clench.

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It’s Official: I Suck

The old me who will soon be the new me

It’s November 30. With this post, I have completed NaBloPoMo. The irony is, I wasn’t participating. I didn’t even know about it until I think last week when I saw it mentioned on a couple blogs I came across. I didn’t set out this month to post every day, but I did.

I did not, however, complete any of the goals I’ve actually set for myself through the course of the past year. In a month, it will be New Year’s Eve and time to set some resolutions for 2010. Not that I ever set resolutions, but I think this might be my year.

A list of my failures:

• Read a minimum of one book per week.
• Write a minimum of one hour per day.
• Cut WAY back on television (I have cut back a little, but I still fall back on it when I’m tired or bored or lazy).
• Diversify what I cook and eat, and cook something new every week.
• Stay off the computer 90 percent of the time while I’m home.
• Pay off my debt (or at least pay it down).
• Lose the rest of the weight and finally hit goal (I gained back 10 pounds instead).
• Exercise a minimum of one hour per day average, no matter what.
• Win NaNoWriMo (I have fewer than 10,000 words as of November 24).

Yep. I suck. And I wish I could say I really, really tried any one of those things, but honestly, I didn’t. They were always in the back of my mind, but I managed to justify not doing each and every one of them one way or another. This has to stop. I need to stop fearing failure. I need to stop making excuses. I need to just do it (see last Thursday’s post).

I’m not waiting until January 1, 2010. I’m starting now. Today. This is the end or procrastinating and dreaming but never doing. I’m committed and that’s that.

Luckily, there is some good news in all of this: I seem to have moved past my writing block. I have learned to just write. To stop listening to that voice in the back of my head telling me it isn’t good enough. To stop rewriting and just push through. I can revise. I can get feedback. I can do this. It may take longer than 30 days, but it will take less than a year. I vow this to myself. I need it. I am suffocating in my life and getting published, or the prospect of getting published, will give me hope. And if I’m lucky, freedom.

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I’m a Guest Blogger Today

A friend and fellow blogger is posting some creative writing on her blog a couple times a week. Today, she’s featuring the short story I wrote for her, so check it out: http://lesleehorner.wordpress.com/.

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Getting Over My Block

I guess what I needed was a deadline, a goal. It seems to me that what I’ve been talking about for years is actually within reach.

Last night, I grabbed my little Inspiron Mini and headed to Borders to work on my novel that I’m writing for the NaNoWriMo challenge. I’m way behind (about 9,000 words) from where I should be, but I started five days late. In two days, I’m a little ahead of what the daily goal would be if this were the second day of the challenge. I think, had I worked on this instead of sleeping all day, I would be caught up. Because, in fewer than 90 minutes at Borders, I wrote more than 2,000 words.

Even if I don’t make my goal by November 30, I will not stop writing this novel. I will finish it.

And it’s not just this challenge. My friend Leslee asked me (among other people) to write a short story for her blog, Waiting for the Click. And in a short time one morning, I wrote an 800-plus word short story, completely off the cuff. She’ll publish it November 19. I’ll put up a reminder, but please check it out on that day.

My habit has been to start writing something — I have a lot of great ideas in my head — and then go back to it and re-read what I’ve written and second guess myself, deleting and rewriting entire sections, starting over completely and then finally getting frustrated and giving up. This is why I didn’t even come close to my goal of having a manuscript ready to shop to agents by my 30th birthday … almost three years ago now.

What’s really difficult right now to wrap my head around is that after all these years and all the frustration, in a month, I will have a novel. Finished. Ready to be critiqued and edited and shopped to agents. And that means there is a possibility that I could have a published novel in the next year or two.

The odds are against me in this, but I’m still going to try. And finishing one novel will teach me that I can do it. I can sit and write and actually finish something. And so, even if this is not the book that will be my big break, I will keep writing and one of the books I finish will be.

For those of you waiting for me to finish the book I previewed here, I promise, promise, promise that it will be my next project. When I finish the one I’m currently working on, I’ll pick that one up again and hammer it out.

As for this one, there will be an excerpt published here on Monday for you all to read and tell me what you think. Feedback is very important, so don’t hold back!

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