Everybody loses all the bloom--we're not peaches--that doesn't mean you get rotten--a gun is better worn and with bloom off--So is a saddle--People too by God. You lose everything that is fresh and everything that is easy and it always seems as though you never could write--But you have more metier and you know more and when you get flashes of the old juice you get more results with them.
Look at how it is at the start--all juice and kick to the writer and cant convey anything to the reader--you use up the juice and the kick goes but you learn how to do it and the stuff when you are no longer young is better than the young stuff--
You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless--there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.
Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 13 September 1929
I believe this is true, even if it's demonstrably (mostly) false in Hemingway's own case. When I was in high school and college, I had a lot of ability but very little control. It was no difficult task to write a five-page, ten-page, fifteen-page paper in a sitting (I may even have written a longer term paper or two this way), but my writing was a flood--I could control when it started and stopped, but almost nothing in between. That sort of thing is beyond my abilities now. I never used to outline my writing, and now my writing is hopeless without it. But my academic writing is far superior now: I can say things with precision and construct arguments more complex and sophisticated. The bloom is gone, but lasting success is the metier and not the bloom (to use Hemingway's terms)--even though almost everyone thinks it's the opposite.
1 comment:
I couldn't agree with you more. I've had exactly the experience you're describing with both my academic/professional writing and my fiction. To me, as in most things, it takes a lot of the fun out of it, but I'm so much happier with the result.
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