Yesterday, I quoted Peter Mayle, a passage from his excellent book on living well where he, in turn, quoted Hemingway on being stuck.
But what did Hemingway do when he was stuck?
The short answer is that he wrote one true sentence and went on from there. The longer answer is more textured –
…[W]hen I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing and it was good and severe discipline.
It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything. …I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Image: front cover of the American edition of A Moveable Feast
I don’t believe that writer’s block exists. I do believe that people will invent excuses not to work. The excuses become more creative when the people avoiding the work are creative. The same is true of the “cures” for this mysterious non-ailment –
Cures for writer’s block are many and various and usually involve getting into debt and into trouble. Women and drink are the two old favorites, but most writers, ingenious and creative fellows that they are, resist the straight-forward solution of finding local women and local drink. They want a change of scene as well, preferably a few days of high-speed roistering in New York or Paris, draining life’s cup to the dregs until the credit cards are canceled. It is what Hemingway described as “the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.” Except that, in this case, the writing hasn’t actually been done. But it will be, it will be. — Peter Mayle, Acquired Tastes
I write from 8 to 11, then again from 1 to 4, sometimes 2 to 5. Today, around 1:30 p.m., the power went out. (The Miami Herald originally reported that both our nuclear reactors tripped at the same time, cutting off electricity to most of the county. The latest word is that it was fire in a substation. We got our power back by 3:00 p.m., but by 4:00 p.m. there were many people still without power. )
I work in a room with no windows. It’s better that way. I don’t want a view, I want to work. Plus the walls are put to better use with bookcases. So when the power went out, so did the air conditioner, the overhead fan (it’s 80 degrees here today), and the computer. Well, the desktop went out, the one I use to answer emails and blog. The laptop, where I write, switched to battery mode. The power went out and stayed out for over an hour, an unusual event here outside of a hurricane.
What do you do without power?
You light a candle. And you work. Working by candlelight made me have one of my most productive days in a long time. Maybe Balzac had it figured out.
Photos: Balzac, by Nadar, article on Balzac, Wikipedia, Gonzalo Barr
The Miami Herald, in a review of Russell Banks’s The Reserve, quoted novelist John Dufresne –
…[Banks] finds dignity in people’s lives, even if they’re desperate lives in some cases. That’s what I admire about his work, that honesty and the sense that these are the people he knows. And he brings the news to those of us who are living middle-class lives. He’s doing what fiction writers should do: Telling us ‘This is what it’s like to be a human being. This is how it feels.’
Photo: John Dufresne, J. Thomas López; Source: The Miami Herald
“The great sin…is to assume that something that has been read once has been read forever. As a very simple example I mention Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. People are expected to read it during their university years. But you are mistaken if you think you read Thackeray’s book then; you read a lesser book of your own. It should be read again when you are 36, which is the age of Thackeray when he wrote it. It should be read for a third time when you are 56, 66, 76, in order to see how Thackeray’s irony stands up to your own experience of life. Perhaps you will not read every page in these later years, but you really should take another look at a great book, in order to find out how great it is, or how great it has remained, to you. You see, Thackeray was an artist, and artists deserve this kind of careful observation. We must not gobble their work, like chocolates, or olives, or anchovies, and think we know it forever. Nobody ever reads the same book twice. — Robertson Davies, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (1992, Grethe B. Peterson, ed.)
Image: William Makepeace Thackeray, University of Adelaide, Australia Library
Candida’s World of Books was the second stop on my book tour in the fall of 2006. The store is in the Logan Circle area in northwest Washington, a neighborhood that’s been undergoing robust gentrification for several years. Beautiful but decayed townhouses that were bought a few years ago for next to nothing have been refurbished and are shockingly expensive.
Now, the Washington City Paper reports that the store is closing. “Thin margins” is the reason that the owner, Candida Mannozzi, gave to the reporter.
Making a bookstore succeed is very difficult under the best of circumstances. Mannozzi further explained that the construction, the cranes blocking the store, made it difficult to attract customers.
I remember my reading. It was a cool Saturday afternoon in October. I arrived early so I could walk around the neighborhood. There was an “antique store” on a corner of Fourteeth Street with a painted statue of a Roman soldier (pictured above) on display outside.
Mannozzi was gracious and welcoming to me, both qualities that this nervous first-time author appreciated. I was looking forward to reading my next book there.
I am saddened to learn that the store is closing. I hope it will reopen somewhere else or maybe even there again. You never know. In the meantime, my best wishes to Candida Mannozzi and her World of Books.
Photo: Gonzalo Barr; Sources: Washington City Paper, publisherslunchdeluxeblog
António Lobo Antunes has published 18 novels since his first, Memória de elefante, in 1979. I own 17 of the 18 novels after searching the Internet for days and finally discovering a lusophone bookseller in Frankfurt, Germany who was willing to ship the lot to me. After a brief wait, the large and heavy box arrived with a bonus — the bookseller was kind enough to include a little book, more of a folio 55 pages long, with poems (letrinhas) written by Lobo Antunes and entitled, Letrinhas de cantigas. If one is to believe the dedication, almost all the letrinhas were written “em toalhas de papel de restaurante” (restaurant paper napkins).Which leads me to wonder how Lobo Antunes became so prolific that he can write in a restaurant while dining? Surely he must eat alone a lot. No one, no matter how disciplined, can write while eating in a public place and being accompanied by another diner at the same table. Is there a time and a place where a writer should put down his pencil and live a little?
Andrés Reynaldo, in El nuevo Herald Miami, recently related a joke — When fellow Portuguese writer, José Saramago, won the Nobel prize in 1998, many people called to congratulate him, after they had called Lobo Antunes to tell him that the prize should have gone to him instead.
Lobo Antunes was born in 1942 in the Lisbon neighborhood of Benfica. He graduated as a physician and psychiatrist and practiced for a few years before he was drafted into the Portuguese army. From 1970 to 1973, he served in Angola during the final stages of that colonial war.
After his return to Lisbon, he practiced psychiatry in the Hospital Miguel Bombarda. In 1979, he published his first novel, Memória de elefante. The following year, he published his second, Conhecimento do inferno. Both are autobiographical.
In Memória de elefante, Lobo Antunes writes about a disenchanted psychiatrist who struggles with an existencial crisis after serving in the Portuguese-Angolan war. The novel is told from several points of view, including those of the protagonist’s wife and daughters.
The novels are densely written and difficult to read. Lobo Antunes has been quoted as saying that he prefers to use indefinite meanings even if he risks confusing the reader. He asks the reader to approach his work without preconceptions. María Luisa Blanco, writer for El país in Madrid and author of Conversaciones con Antonio Lobo Antunes, said that in his works, the present and the past become mixed.
While unknown in the US, the author is known in lusophone Brazil, and very well known and read in continental Europe. One commentator compares Lobo Antunes’s work to that of James Joyce or William Faulkner. His language slips in and out of the consciousness of one or another character.
Yet Lobo Antunes expressly denies being influenced by Joyce or Faulkner. In this undirected interview (in Portuguese), Lobo Antunes is asked one of the usual questions — Name the fiction that most influenced you? His answer: reading Donald Duck, Flash Gordon, Mandrake, Jules Verne. And he quotes a line from Journey to the Center of the Earth –
Lobo Antunes has won numerous literary prizes, namely Prémio Franco-Português, 1987 (Cus de Judas), Grande Prémio de Romance e Novela da Associação Portuguesa de Escritores, 1985 (Auto dos Danados), Best Foreign Book Published in France, 1997 (Manual dos Inquisidores), Prémio Tradução Portugal/Frankfurt, 1997 (Manual dos Inquisidores), Prix France-Culture (A Morte de Carlos Gardel), European Literature Prize, Austria, 2000, Prémio União Latina , 2003, Prémio Ovídio da União dos Escritores Romenos, 2003, Prémio Fernando Namora, 2004, Jerusalem Prize, 2005, and the Prémio Camões in 2007.
I’m not stuck. There are days when I don’t know what to write next, but that is only because I haven’t sat down long enough to think about it. I’m just putting off writing. There are days when I would rather be doing something else besides writing my novel. This is one of them.
Woke later than usual. Posted about the Fric-Frac Club. Surfed the Web. Organized my desk, though it needed no organizing. Went to check on my dog, Sancho Panza. (He’s OK. Says “hi” to everyone.) Took pictures of the rain. Sat back down. Uploaded pictures of the rain. Started post about being stuck, even though I am not stuck, just wasting time. Was going to write, “When you’re stuck, go outside and take a picture of the rain…” when I received this email –
Congratulations as we bring to your notice, The Foundazion di Vittorio
has chosen you by the board of trusteesas one of the final recipients
of a Cash Grant/Donation for your own personal, educational, and
business development. To celebrate the 30th anniversary program, We are
giving out a yearly donation of US$500,000.00 (Five Hundred
Thousand United States Dollars) to 10 lucky recipients, as charity
donations/aid from the VittorioFoundation, ECOWAS, EU and the UNO in
accordance with the enabling act of Parliament. which is part of ourpromotion.
To file for your claim you are to fill out below information and send
it to the Payment Remitance Office Via their
email contact address:
The writer then asks for personal information that he claims is necessary to process this outlandishly generous cashgrant/donation in celebration of the 30th anniversary of whatever, which they celebrate yearly.
I used to get emails from some “heir” with a ridiculous name and a title to match, claiming that he was entitled to a multi-billion dollar fortune in Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, etc., which he could collect if I lent him a few thousand dollars to process the inheritance. You see, this “heir” was short of cash, but he wouldn’t be, if I came to his aid. Get it? In gratitude, the “heir” would not only refund my loan, he would give me a sizeable percentage of the multi-billion dollar inheritance, just for being a good samaritan.
My public email address daily receives emails offering me pictures of nude women, cheap Viagra, and the opportunity to chat online with some bored sixteen-year-old Russian girl named Yulia who is really some loser named Pavel.
With all these distractions — USD 50,000 here, naughty Yulia over there — it’s a miracle that I can shut everything off and sit down to write. But write I must. Because if I don’t, I might end up like Pavel, who is such a loser that the best he can do is try to scam people out of their money instead of making a living legitimately, through hard work, like the rest of us.
So, as I had started to post — When you are stuck, go outside and take a picture of the rain. Then sit at your desk. You have work to do.
Shopping for books at a megastore can be an act of defiance these days. Never mind the music played at near earblasting volumes. It is so much easier to click on the Internet and order your book on line. It doesn’t help when you take the trouble to drive to a book store only to meet an ignorant clerk — one who doesn’t know what the hell you are talking about and who has an attitude to match his ignorance, for what is ignorance unaccompanied by arrogance?
Fortunately, most booksellers — especially those who work for independent bookstores — do it for the love of books and of reading. They know their jobs. And even if some of them are waiting to be discovered as writers, they won’t let you know it.
Everyone has a story or two about the ignorant clerk. How about the one who worked in a chain store on Fifth Avenue in New York City? I was a freshman in college. When a classmate of mine (who was planning to study law) asked her for a book on Penology, she sent him to the sex books. My classmate eventually graduated from law school and is now a lawyer, in spite of the clerk. The bookstore has since disappeared.
Or how about this little exchange, verbatim, that also occured during my freshman year, in the Columbia University bookstore no less? –
Clerk 1 : Hey, do we have The Book of Genesis? Clerk 2 : I dunno. Who’s the author?
I looked at the interlocutors of this brief dialogue, convinced that it was some form of theater. It wasn’t.
For those of you who have walked away from an experience like this, convinced that it would never happen in the cultured and literate capitals of Europe, here’s an excerpt from the very witty and intelligent blog, Fric-Frac Club. The blog was launched recently by a group of French literary writers and bloggers, including our colleagues, Bartleby les yeux ouverts and Tabula Rasa.
Here’s an exchange written by one of the correspondents of the blog, La Buse, between an unidentified “Moi” and a clerk for the French megastore Fnac, identified only as ”Lui” (my translation into English follows) –
A la Fnac
Moi : Bonjour, je cherche Madman Bovary, s’il vous plaît. Lui : MA-DAME Bovary, en poche, au rayon classique, sur votre gauche. Moi : Non, c’est Madman Bovary. Le livre de Claro. Lui (tapotant sur son clavier) : C’est chez qui? Moi : Verticales. Lui : Madman, c’est ça? Avec un e à la fin? Moi : Non. Madman tout court. Lui : Ah, oui. C’est sorti le 8. Faut le commander. 1 à 3 semaines. Moi : C’est long. Lui : Sinon, il faut aller sur Fnac.com, c’est plus rapide.
Silence Moi (tentant le diable): Et vous auriez pas la date de sortie de 2666, par hasard ? Lui : Faut que vous alliez voir mon collègue au rayon cinéma, au fond, là-bas… Moi : On ne peut pas le faire d’ici ? Lui : Non, c’est lui qui s’occupe du rayon cinéma. Allez voir dans le rayon cinéma asiatique, il doit y être. Moi : Votre collègue? Lui : Non, votre livre sur le film de Ouang Ka Ouaille… Moi : Ah, d’accord. Merci. Lui : Je vous en prie.
* * * Me : Good morning. I’m looking for Madman Bovary, please. He : “Ma-DAME Bovary.” Paperback. Published by Rayon Classique. On your left. Me : No, it’s Madman Bovary, the book by Claro. He : (Tapping on his computer keyboard) Who’s the publisher? Me : Verticales. He : “Madman,” that’s all? With an “e” at the end? Me : Just “Madman.” He : Ah yes. Comes out on the eighth. You’ll have to order it. One to three weeks. Me : That’s a long time. He : If not, go to fnac.com. It’s faster.
(Silence) Me : (pushing my luck) And would you, by chance, know the release date for 2666? He : You need to talk to my colleague at the Rayon Cinema display. At the end. Back there. Me : Can’t we check that here? He : No. He’s the one in charge of Rayon Cinema. You need to look in Asian Rayon Cinema. Me : For your colleague? He : No, for your book about the film by Wong Kar-wai. Me : Oh, alright. Thanks. He : You’re very welcome.
The Fric-Frac Club is comprised of A.W. (Dernière Marge), BARTLEBY (Bartleby Les Yeux Ouverts) BELANE (Pulp !), CLARO (Le Clavier Cannibale), FAUSTO (Tabula Rasa), GARP (L’Escargot Garpien), JDM (Food For Your Ears), J.S. (L’Ombre Des Idées), LA BUSE (Fric-Frac Buse), LAZARE (La Bruyantissime), MOOLZ (La Mygale Pourpre), ODOT (Player_pianoblog), OTARIE (Le Festin Mue), PEDRO BABEL (Babel XXV), THOMZ (A Country For Old Men), UNTEL (N’importe Quoi).
Meanwhile, make sure you stop by Fric-Frac Club, where the post today is by Bartleby and about bullfighting, by way of Wittgenstein.
(NOTE: Thanks to Bartleby for the correction and my apologies to La Buse for misattributing the authorship of the dialogue in my original post. I promise to eat my carrots at dinner tonight.)
If you think a writer’s life is exciting, below is Nick Hornby describing his average day –
AN AVERAGE DAY: ‘I have an office round the corner from my home. I arrive there between 9:30 and 10 a.m., smoke a lot, write in horrible little two-and-three sentence bursts, with five-minute breaks in between. Check for emails during each break, and get irritated if there aren’t any. Go home for lunch. If I’m picking up my son I leave at 3:30. If not, I stay till six. It’s all pretty grim! And so dull!’
