In today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* Prompted by the first post
* 10 Steps to Becoming a Writer
* Another good-enough day
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.” Ernest Hemingway
“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.” Ernest Hemingway
“What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most? There was no choice at all.” Ernest Hemingway
Prompted by the first post in “Of Interest” below, I started looking for quotes on writing by Ernest Hemingway. The best few I found appear above.
In another one, he mentioned that he never drank after supper or before he wrote or while he was writing. Kind of destroys the myth that he often wrote while drunk or drinking, doesn’t it?
You can gain a full mentorship on writing by reading Hemingway’s works (at first for pleasure, then reading them again to study them) and by reading what he has to say about writing and by then PRACTICING what he says about writing. The three quotes above are three of those. But there are many others.
You can’t learn to be a writer without writing. Without practice you can only learn to be a student of writing.
But don’t pay much attention to “Hemingway said” or “Hemingway meant” quotes by others. Like the “Heinlein meant” quotes, most of them are either severely diluted or bullshit. Go straight to the source whenever possible.
As I searched for quotes from Hemingway this morning, at the second link in “Of Interest” below, a pop-up made available to me a “free book” titled 10 Steps to Becoming a Writer.
Out of curiosity, I downloaded it. Primarily because I know of only one step: If you want to become a writer, You must write (Heinlein’s Rule 1). Knowing my own sometimes snarky soul, I might ridicule parts (or all) of that book in upcoming posts.
Then again, should you download it too, and should something you read in it spark your writing, more power to you. Anything that leads you to Heinlein’s Rule 1 is a good thing.
I had another good-enough day of writing yesterday, but with only three days left in the month I’m wondering whether the novel will wrap in time for me to boast having written six novels in the first quarter of the year.
Not that I won’t boast anyway, but it would be nice for me personally to know I had done it in 90 days rather than 91 or more. That prospect makes that non-writing day on March 20 loom large.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
See “The Man Behind the Hemingway Myth” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/the-man-behind-the-hemingway-myth/.
See “23 Essential Quotes From Ernest Hemingway About Writing” at https://thewritepractice.com/hemingway-quotes/. A pretty good article before the quotes.
See “Light at the end of the Tunnel” at https://killzoneblog.com/2021/03/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel.html. Yeah, she asked us to share, so I shared. (grin)
The Numbers
The Journal…………………………………… 560 words
Writing of The Journey Home: Part 9 (novel)
Day 1…… 2019 words. Total words to date…… 2019
Day 2…… 3650 words. Total words to date…… 5669
Day 3…… 3760 words. Total words to date…… 9429
Day 4…… 2834 words. Total words to date…… 12263
Day 5…… 2959 words. Total words to date…… 15222
Day 6…… 3394 words. Total words to date…… 18616
Day 7…… 2727 words. Total words to date…… 21343
Day 8…… 3436 words. Total words to date…… 24779
Day 9…… 4043 words. Total words to date…… 28822
Day 10… 2558 words. Total words to date…… 31380
Day 11… 7097 words. Total words to date…… 38477
Day 12… 4077 words. Total words to date…… 42554
Total fiction words for March……… 79542
Total fiction words for the year………… 278550
Total nonfiction words for March… 20150
Total nonfiction words for the year…… 66180
Total words for the year (fiction and this blog)…… 344730
Calendar Year 2021 Novels to Date…………………… 5
Calendar Year 2021 Novellas to Date……………… X
Calendar Year 2021 Short Stories to Date… 3
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………………………………… 59
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)………………………………… 8
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)………………… 217
Short story collections……………………………………………… 31
Disclaimer: In this blog, I provide advice on writing fiction. I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. To be crystal clear, WITD is not “the only way” to write, nor will I ever say it is. However, as I am the only writer who advocates WITD both publicly and regularly, I will continue to do so, among myriad other topics.