In the US, Labor Day marks the end of summer and a time to return to work. This is a formality for everyone except the full-time student. The employed adult has a different story to tell, especially in a country where “workaholism” is a kind of virtue. But there is still something about summer as a period of legitimate idleness that lingers into adulthood.
Writers don’t vacation. They may travel or take a day off, but if they are in the middle of writing anything — and they usually are — the work continues in the unconscious. Which explains why you can put something aside and come back to it later with fresh eyes. You see problems that you did not see before. The work has not changed. You have. And the reason you have changed is because you have continued to work on it, even if you did not do so consciously.
That is what happened to Ernest Hemingway with his first novel –
“I started ‘The Sun Also Rises’ on the 21st of July, my birthday, in Valencia,” he wrote. Work on the first draft was continued through the last ten days of July and the month of August in Valencia, Madrid, St. Sebastian, and Hendaye, and a complete run-through was finished in Paris on September 21, 1925.
“There is only one thing to do with a novel,” he once told Fitzgerald, “and that is to go straight on through to the end of the damned thing.” […] The first draft of The Sun Also Rises was set down in approximately forty-eight writing days, but Hemingway nearly killed himself in the process. “I knew nothing about writing a novel when I started it,” he realized in 1948, “and so wrote too fast and each day to the point of complete exhaustion. So the first draft was very bad…I had to rewrite it completely. But in the rewriting I learned much.”
Following a rest period…[to give] the first draft a chance to settle and objectify itself, he went down to Schruns in the Voralberg in mid-December. Here he spent the period before Christmas in skiing and revising his book. A trip to New York in mid-February provided a brief interlude in the concentrated labors of rewriting. These filled January, part of February, and the month of March. By April first the book was ready for the typist. Heavy cuts in the original opening and elsewhere had now reduced a much longer novel to about 90,000 words. The completed typescript was mailed to Maxwell Perkins on April 24, 1926. The total operation had covered nine months of extremely hard work.
– Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1972), at 75-76 (emphasis mine)
The word, “objectify,” is not in quotation marks, but it might as well be. It sounds like a word Hemingway would have used. And it refers to what happens when you set aside your manuscript and give the unconscious a chance to work.
One day, I am certain neuroscientists will strip away the veneer of mystery surrounding the creation of art. Until then, it is enough to know that we must make time and room for the unconscious and accommodate it as part of creating fiction. Writers too need their vacations, even if they are still working.
Photo: Gonzalo Barr; Source: Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1972), at 75-76
kevin monroe | 17-Sep-09 at 5:13 am | Permalink
WELCOMe BACK. The following quote is from Don DeLillo.
“If you’re talking about Hemingway, the Hemingway sentence is what makes Hemingway. It’s not the bullfights or the safaris or the wars, it’s a clear, direct, and vigorous sentence. It’s the simple connective —- the word ‘and’ is more important to Hemingways’s work than Africa or Paris.
Gonzalo Barr | 19-Sep-09 at 5:42 am | Permalink
Thank you, Kevin! I can’t remember where I read that Hemingway used to read the King James for the English. It was there that he learned to begin sentences with “and” for the rhythm.