Hemingway Knows

A week into the new agency job, I’m having a great time doing creative things like concepting and brainstorming, but there’s still an afternoon slump where the ideas slow down. Even after all this time, I still have doubts that they’ll come back again the next morning, but I try not to worry and I think about this advice from Hem in A Moveable Feast: 

I learned not to think about anything that 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 hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to it.

Brackets For Book Lovers

Since I’m alive and have social interaction with other people, I’ve heard about March Madness. Because this is generally my reaction to team sports, I’ve never participated in filling out brackets and picking the winning teams.

But now,  Out of Print has come up with “Book Madness,” in which they pair both heroes and villains of literature. You get to pick who will “win” and advance to the next round, and let me tell you: I get it now, basketball fans.  Filling out this bracket was awesome. You can see my picks for “Final Four” and the champion below:

Final bracket
(It was a close match between Holmes and Jane, but Holmes beats everything. Even the ultimate evil.)

You have to create an account to fill out the bracket, but it’s worth it if you’re a book nerd (and you get a discount code for a book t-shirt). Since these “teams” can’t actually play each other, the winners of each round will be voted on, so your account lets you weigh in there, too.

I’ll have to remember how much I enjoyed this bracket when people at work start talking about the basketball kind. Thanks for the moment of insight, Book Madness!

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I love every single word in this article, which begins, ” A truck carrying 27 tons of brunost, a Norwegian brown cheese, caught fire in a tunnel in Narvik on Thursday and burned with gooey rage until Monday.”

2. The food blog Dinner: A Love Story (are you reading it? you should be) posted “nine rules of blogging,” which happen to be really good rules for writing, too–see Rule 4:

If I can’t explain it in a title and a subtitle, I’m in trouble. If I can, there’s my idea. It’s really nothing more than the topic sentence we learn about in third grade writing. Once I know what I want to say, I spend the rest of the piece saying it.

And see Rule 9:

There is literally no reason not to write. Nothing bad can come of it. Even if no one reads what you are writing, you have a chronicle of something. You are creating something…How is that ever bad?

Happy Birthday, Beryl

It’s the birthday of Beryl Markham today. She was a horse trainer, pilot, and author (probably) of the memoir West With the Night, which I should read again and you should read too, if you haven’t. (It impressed the hell out of Hemingway.)

She was friends with Karen Blixen, lovers with Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and was the first woman to fly solo from east to west across the Atlantic. Beryl was fierce! Let’s all be more like her.

Another Birthday

I know this makes thing pretty author-heavy this week, but I couldn’t miss mentioning Hemingway’s birthday today!

(That is the manliest turtleneck I have ever seen. Well done, Papa.)

Today’s birthday quote comes from an archived LIFE interview from 1952 when he was awarded the Pulitzer for The Old Man and the Sea:

“The right way to do it–style–is not just an idle concept,” he says. “It is simply the way to get done what is supposed to be done. The fact that the right way also looks beautiful when it’s done is just incidental.”

Happy Birthday, Cormac McCarthy

Happy birthday to one of the two novelists who make me despair of ever writing anything as good: Cormac! I haven’t been reading him lately because I’ve been trying to keep an even emotional keel, but here’s something from All the Pretty Horses I posted back in 2007:

They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

*The first writer who makes me want to give up is Virginia Woolf, of course.

And We Have Mrs. Steinbeck To Thank For The Title

This morning’s Writer’s Almanac had a lot of good background about The Grapes of Wrath, which was published today in 1939. Originally Steinbeck was asked to do a piece for Life magazine, but when it wasn’t published he ended up writing a novel, finishing the first draft in 100 days.

A quote taken from the article:
I break myself every time I go out [in the fields] because the argument that one person’s effort can’t really do anything doesn’t seem to apply when you come on a bunch of starving children and you have a little money. I can’t rationalize it for myself anyway. So don’t get me a job for a slick. I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this.

I think you succeeded in doing that and more, John. Good job.

Virginia

The Writer’s Almanac tells me that 70 years ago today, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse.

In Mrs. Dalloway, shell-shocked Septimus hears birds sing at him in Greek, which I’ve read was her own experience during a depressive episode. I’m glad she was able to write what she did–and that we can treat mental illness a little bit better now.

Does This Apply To Writing Websites, Too?

What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them, which become a sentence. When a writer does that, day after day, working alone with little encouragement, often with discouragement flowing in the writer’s own blood, and with an occasional rush of excitement … the treasure is on the desk.

[…]The writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul.

I don’t think Andre Dubus wrote for the web a lot, but it’s still something to consider.

Quite A Weekend For Authors

If you had a birthday over the last day or so and you want to be a children’s book author, you have good company: Yesterday was the birthday of Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), Madeleine L’Engle, and C.S. Lewis. And today is the birthday of L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables) and Mark Twain.