Hemingway and the process of writing

Reading a moveable feast has recently made me reevaluate my own self, my own writing, or lack thereof, and wonder why the simplicity and apparent honesty of his work makes me want to write again. What's that? After five plus years of dryness, it takes a book- a scrap-book like book indeed, to make me want to write again, and here it is, opening doors into memory, making me recall what was forgotten, and simply, making my fingers itch to connect pencil and paper, or keyboard and the tap tap tap that used to warn my husband not to disturb me. I just started writing this, and he is shrieking on the phone, ignoring my third plea to move to the bedroom. I cant blame him, he has gotten used to my using the laptop only to shop online and pass the time.

My critique of the in my own words, scrapbook will come later, after I finish reading it. But less than halfway through,it makes me write more than I have probably written in months. I hope to persist.

I remember things now, which I used to write in my dream journal, and then, promptly forget when I went into deeper sleep, or awoke. A dream journal conveys many things, doesn’t it, but to me it is the journal my sub conscious writes when I am semi conscious. It is something I have done since I could string sentences together, and that is, believe me, a very long time. I do it at times when my mind is not otherwise occupied. I do it in my sleep. I have brilliant, or so it seems, ideas which, sadly, vanish in the daylight. This journal has been my only constant in god alone knows how many years- because, people, well people, they come and they go and it is not often that I feel more than a dull ache when they leave. Its not that I cant feel pain. I feel too intensely and then I tend to shut up and refuse to let people in. it's how I operate, really.

I was born a writer. It seems pretentious to say so now, after all, I have no published body of work and nor do I have any work at all to show for several years of my life, but there it is. I started to read as soon as I could make sentences out and by the age of six I was reading alone, with mom too busy tending to my younger siblings to help much. The last book I remember her reading to me was 'the three billy goats gruff'. I don’t remember the story too well, but I loved the ladybird series of illustrated classics. So I think I was born an art lover too.

Writing was a natural complement to reading because I ran out of books to read very quickly. We were not affluent at the time, and my parents could not afford to buy me books every week. So I would string my own stories together, of course, not knowing at the time what it was I was doing. It was only when I was nine, and we started to write compositions at school, that I realized what I was doing in my head, and sometimes, in paper, illustrated with very unlike compositions in crayon. Suddenly, the teacher was reading my stories aloud to the class, and praising my imagination in my report cards. When I met that teacher a few weeks before my high school graduation, she asked me if I was still writing. You were such a good writer, she said. I hope you keep it up.

Well, I did my best. At least in those early years I did. My poems were crude, but they rhymed, and my stories grew so long that my hand ached before my imagination gave out. I wonder where I got my inspiration from- at the age of eleven, I had convinced mum to teach me how to use word star, and written a few chapters of a book- about a group of people exploring the Bermuda triangle no less- what was I reading in those days? I have it up eventually, because I decided I did not want to continue. By sixteen I was addicted to cheap paperback romances and had mapped out a whole story arc. About a family of two sisters and their friends and how each found love. I even finished the first book, about a pop singer who fell in love with her sister's brother in law, and yes, it was meant to be book two in the series. Of course, a sixteen year old writing about love and sex when she had never even been kissed is quite something. I have to laugh at myself, and I remember laughing and cringing equally when I reread the whole story at twenty. Too bad I cant read floppy disks any more. I believe reworking those books now would be a good idea.

Honesty and truth, said Hemingway, or at least the actor who portrayed him in Midnight in Paris. Maybe that’s why I could not write for so long, because after all, too much honesty and too much truth can lead to a reaction and a too severe release of emotion.