First, I want to thank everyone for your great responses to my last column – the one about ‘Try this in a small town’ or something like that. My most common running joke when I meet some of you around town and you say, “I read your articles,” is to say “Oh, you’re the one!” Anyway, it’s good to know that someone out there is reading these, and the only real way to know is when you like or share the article if you are able. Seeing so many people liking and sharing articles is very uplifting.
What would be cool, if it were possible, would be for everyone to go ahead and interact with this column socially (if you were directed here via social media) too. That’ll freak me out a little since this one isn’t on a hot-button topic. You know, give it a ‘like.’
We live in a weird dystopian world where writers sit around wondering if anyone can even read anymore, or if they do read, and if he doesn’t write in a very narrow, specific genre wherein little hives (or colonies) of zealots read a lot (like cozy murder mysteries, chick romances, or sasquatch porn) then being a writer today can be depressing. I can only imagine what the buggy whip makers felt like when everyone was zipping around in cars.
Anyway… I started getting quite a few emails and messages from you all, and some of it has been about writing, so I figured I’d follow up a hot-button-topic article with one no one will read. Just to test the loyalty of my reading audience. (wink, wink)
This one might be in a few parts (a ploy to get you coming back to read each column) and will be a bit of a personal history peppered here and there with narrow opinions that no one cares about.
Several of the emails I received about writing mentioned Hemingway or mentioned me mentioning Hemingway, and one, in particular, asked me about Hemingway’s influence on me as a writer.
I read Hemingway all the time, and I read biographies of Hemingway. I like his writing, but I think he was a pretty horrible person. I am probably a horrible person too, and I don’t think that makes me a good writer, though it does help me to identify character traits and behaviors I would rather not exhibit. I don’t want to be a horrible person, but I think Hemingway didn’t much care if he was or not.
Maybe being a horrible person did help Hemingway as a writer, but I can tell you it’s done nothing for me.
I do not write (at all) like Hemingway, though every young writer at some point tries to. Hemingway’s style is very peculiarly associated with short, almost staccato sentences bereft of any words (like bereft) that someone might have to look up in a dictionary. My own goal as a writer is to usually include at least one word that at least one reader might have to go look up. I also write very long sentences, sometimes with weird or no punctuation, and I include occasional truncated or incomplete sentences for emotional impact or scene development. We do not always speak in complete sentences. Usually. My overall goal, unlike Hemingway, is to cause the voice in your head as you read what I write, to perfectly match up with my own way of talking or communicating. That is to say, I write exactly like I talk if I’m allowed to talk for very long without someone interrupting me. I am talking to you in your head.
Hemingway is famous for his “One True Sentence” line, which has been mythologized and spiritualized beyond what he actually meant by it. There is almost a religion that has come up around this idea of writing “One True Sentence,” but let us take a look at it.
The cultists will start asking “What is truth?” And then they’ll skip down some primrose path trying to identify some esoteric or spiritual “truth” that they believe might resonate with the human souls of imaginary readers. This is not what Hemingway meant. If they’d read past the cool part, they’d see that he explains what he means:
“Sometimes when 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 scroll-work or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”
Seems all very spiritual, but it’s not. We find the meaning hidden in the final sentence and not the first one. “…The first true simple declarative sentence…”
To see how this works with Hemingway, go to any of his novels, flip open the book, find a section that isn’t all dialogue, and just write the sentences vertically instead of horizontally:
“It was a fine morning.”
“The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom.”
“There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day.”
“I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette.”
“The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock.”
“Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne.”
“The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work.”
These are notes you might write in a notebook as you look around.
It’s not a bunch of spiritual mumbo-jumbo. It’s just a reporter reporting on what happened. It’s beautiful, but it’s just WHAT HAPPENED. And it didn’t have to really happen. It’s not that kind of truth. It’s what happened in the story, or to the character. It is true in that it can be imagined that it really happened. The author has experienced this or something very close to it, and that experienced truth is communicated through his character if it is fiction. The best tools of a good writer are a remarkable memory and a heightened awareness of what is happening. Bad writing tries to create a world that is inescapably untrue. In bad writing, the characters think things no one thinks, they ignore things that are obvious and evident in the environment and spend 99% of their time in their own head thinking in purple prose. Bad writing doesn’t seem like it ever really happened. Great writing makes you unsure because it feels like the writer is telling you a true story – only changing a few of the elements in order to make it seem like fiction.
I know it was way back in the early part of the 20th century, but Hemingway’s dialogue is just weird. Probably people talked like that back then, but they certainly don’t now.
“Don’t look like that, darling.”
“How do you want me to look?”
“Oh, don’t be a fool. I’m going away to-morrow.”
“To-morrow?”
“Yes. Didn’t I say so? I am.”
“Let’s have a drink, then. The count will be back.”
“Yes. He should be back. You know he’s extraordinary about buying champagne. It means any amount to him.”
I wouldn’t like to be hanging around people who talk like that.
I like a lot of other writers too, and I study writing. Most writers, even the popular and successful ones, either write poorly or just adequately. An adequate writer is a writer that is invisible and does his or her job exactly like you would expect and exactly like anyone else hired to do the same job would do it. Some adequate writers make a great deal of money because they have found a niche writing boilerplate stuff that people who are into that stuff will pay for. My father reads a book a day. Mostly spy books and thrillers. He cannot tell you at the end of the day what book he read, who the author was, or what the story was. He is just being entertained by reading what is comfortable for him to read. He does not want a writer with a “voice” or a “style” that will get in his way. He wants the same story, told with different trappings, every day. Those writers who write those books are what I call “adequate” writers. It’s not an insult. It’s just a fact.
Most writing is bad writing, and even some bad writers make a lot of money. That’s just the way it is. And with AI becoming such a big force in the business, bad writing will multiply and people who pay to read bad writing will have more of it, will pay less for it, and will probably be happy until the next generation (a generation that does not read) comes along and then no one is paying for it anymore. Your movies, your videos, and your entertainment will all be spewed out of apps and programs, and it will adapt to your peccadillos, and you will never be required or permitted to think anything new or challenging. I know writers who are already using AI and ChatGPT for everything from writing their social media posts to who-knows-what else. I like to think that there is a future for someone like me who won’t ever give in to the machine. We’ll see. Most of what I write I don’t publish anyway, so I don’t guess it’ll matter much.
In the next part, unless something more pressing comes up, I’ll talk a little about how writing (the business and the work) has changed and some other self-indulgent musings. This should teach you all a lesson for writing me emails.
You can, however, contact me at [email protected] if you want to encourage my bad behavior.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.