A writer Writes

 

By the end of this summer I'll of read two volumes by Ernest Hemingway A Farewell To Arms and the book I'm currently reading, A movable feast . I've totally enjoyed both button coming away with a whole new appreciation for writing from the Feast for which I'm totally surprised. I have not read this book before sure I would've remembered. The book is a memoir of about three years of his life while he lived in Paris. I knew I would like to book but not knowing anything about the book I'm surprised how much I do like it particularly how he describes his life as a writer in pre-World War II Paris actually it's probably more post-World War I Paris. He describes his meetings with the likes of Ezra Pound, Gloria Stein, and many other poets and writers. The chum around together mainly writes about cafés some better than others as well as talk about some of the writers he associates with whom he likes more than others. I'm fascinated by how he supports himself as a writer. I never really thought about it much but it was also straightforward he would write something and then get paid and he would have to live off of the commission he was awarded. I know this sounds so basic that it shouldn't be as fascinating to me as it is but it is.

What I really like is how he describes his writing process during this time. He essentially has a restaurant/café/bar that he goes to every morning and sits down with a pencil (probably a handful of pencils actually) and writes any rights for two hours or three hours until he exhausts his creativity for the day after which he and his wife to go out and do something or just not around for the rest of the day until the next morning when Hemingway would start the process over again until he finishes the project whether it's essays or novel. I am now fascinated with what he did during the war. I knew he was involved in some level as a medic or something which I think was during the first war and in the second world war I believe Hemingway was a correspondent.

I don't know why I have to read something like Hemingway's life to realize how important the first few hours awaking is in the creative process at least of my creative process. When I first began this blog back in the late 1990s are found that I wrote my best material in the first hour or so after coming to work. This was when I worked with the state of Utah as an information and referral specialist. I would write before the phone calls started coming in. When I could not write early in the morning and had to wait till later in the day or when I went home, to write, the quality of the post was significantly different. I wrote better when I was fresh and that makes sense now. Hemingway just brought this back to my attention. I'm currently playing around with an idea to write a number of “shoe stories”. I may have talked about that before in this blog I can't remember right now getting late. But I'm going to try to set up a schedule to write a little bit each morning until my creativity leaves and see if that's a doable project who knows the proof is in the writing…