Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.” 

Interesting Facts About Words

Shakespeare used around 29,000 different words in his plays. About 6,000 words only appear once. About 10,000 words are not found in any surviving English literature prior to Shakespeare. (X)

“Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can’t not write. The rest is show-business. I can’t state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you’re writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.” — Peter S. Beagle

Read it for its deeper meaning?

Yesterday at work (remember I work now at a bookstore), a young teen, about sixteen, asked me for the bookLord of the Flies by William Goldin. As I was searching for it in our system he proceeded to tell me that he had read it once and did not like it. I told him I had read the book when I was about his age and said I actually enjoyed it.

            Before he let me finish explaining why, he responded by telling me that he knew it was a good book because it had a deeper meaning. For the next few seconds he attempted to detail to me that deeper meaning. Unfortunately I had a customer come up and interrupt our conversation so I was not able to let him know one important point I wanted to make.

            Regardless of whether the book had what he thought was a “deeper meaning”, and despite the fact that I enjoyed it but he did not, these factors do not necessarily make the story good. On one level—the literary or technique of writing level, the story is, in fact, a good story. But I understood what he meant, he did not prefer that story because his tastes where of a different ilk. I wanted to explain to him that that was actually okay, not to get discouraged as a reader. Keep trying to find works that you enjoy, there are millions of books out there and certainly of those he could find plenty of stories he’ll end up enjoying—some with “deeper meanings.”

            The thing that struck me about him was that he had a pretty good grasp of what Golding had written in Lord of the Flies, and in my experience this is rare for sixteen year old boys. Most sixteen year old boys don’t give a rat’s ass about Golding, his stories, or whether they understand them or not. I was afraid he mistook my comment that I enjoyed Lord of the Flies as a message that because I enjoyed it, he must enjoy it too. That was certainly not my intent. I hope he continues to read.