It was a Friday night and I was bartending at Pescatores Italian Restaurant where I work. We had been busy all night and the customers were finally starting to clear out. Just as I started to clean up, in walked well known authors: Don DeLillo, Ray Bradbury, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, Simone de Beauvoir and E.B. White. Usually I would be upset if customers came in when we were about to close, but not this time. The bar was dim as usual, and quiet because all the other customers had left. It was past closing time, and besides us, the owner was the only other person in the building. I couldn’t wait to talk to them about writing, but first, I had to see what they wanted to drink.
“Good evening, how are you tonight? What are we having?” “Hello, I’m doing well, I’ll have a Glenlivet 12 straight up please.” said Don. “Make that two please.” said Jack. “And I’ll have an old fashioned with Bulliet Rye please.” said Ray. “What do you suggest for a good red wine?” asked Elwyn. “I’ll give you a Cline Pinot Noir, it’s the owners favorite.” “I’ll have the same.” said Simone. “I’ll have one as well, thank you.” said Joan. “I’ll have a Kettle One martini straight up with olives please.” said Ernest. … I made their drinks and we began to talk about writing… “I just started taking this writing class in college, do you have any insight that could help me to be more successful in it? Maybe you could tell me the best times to write?” Ernest looked at me with thoughtful eyes and said “When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.” “I’m always in a hurry to get going, though in general I dislike starting the day. I first have tea and then, at about ten o’clock, I get under way and work until one” said Simone. Then Don chimed in and said “I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours and then go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another.” “So it seems like mornings are the way to go? I’ll have to try it sometime. What about distractions? Do you have any, and if so, how do you avoid them?” Ray thought for a second and then said “I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up with my parents and my brother in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in the living room, with the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same time.” Then Elwyn looked up and said “I never listen to music when I’m working. I haven’t that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn’t like it at all. On the other hand, I’m able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There’s a lot of traffic. But it’s a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me.” Elwyn paused for a second then added “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” “I really like what you said there Elwyn. You all are very helpful, it’s nice to see that you all have similarities and differences. It’s like there is no right way or wrong way of writing, everyone is different. So, what inspires you to write? How do you start writing?” “My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.” said Ray with bright eyes. Then Don asked for another drink and said “A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it. Looking out the window, reading random entries in the dictionary. To break the spell I look at a photograph of Borges, a great picture sent to me by the Irish writer Colm Tóín. The face of Borges against a dark background — Borges fierce, blind, his nostrils gaping, his skin stretched taut, his mouth amazingly vivid; his mouth looks painted; he’s like a shaman painted for visions, and the whole face has a kind of steely rapture. I’ve read Borges of course, although not nearly all of it, and I don’t know anything about the way he worked — but the photograph shows us a writer who did not waste time at the window or anywhere else. So I’ve tried to make him my guide out of lethargy and drift, into the otherworld of magic, art, and divination.” “You’re so inspiring, I really appreciate all of your feedback. One more thing before you go, just for fun, what is the weirdest part of your writing routine?” Jack laughed and said “I’m hung up on the number nine though I’m told a Piscean like myself should stick to number seven; but I try to do nine touchdowns a day, that is, I stand on my head in the bathroom, on a slipper, and touch the floor nine times with my toe tips, while balanced. This is incidentally more than yoga, it’s an athletic feat, I mean imagine calling me ‘unbalanced’ after that.” Joan also chuckled and said “When I’m really working I don’t like to go out or have anybody to dinner, because then I lose the hour. If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits. Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.” I laughed and said “Those are very interesting parts of your routines. Thank you so much for answering my questions and thanks for coming in tonight! It was a pleasure meeting you all! Have a great evening.” We said our goodbyes and then they left. How can you create fiction when reality comes to call? by Carolyn Chute and 6 Ways to be a Hemingway-Level Productive Badass by Drake Baer are two very different articles about pretty much the same thing, writing and the distractions that come along with it. Carolyn Chute seems like more of a disorganized writer. In her article she talks about the many distractions surrounding her throughout the day. She talks about having to take care of the dogs, multiple people coming over to visit, and doing the laundry and the dishes. Carolyn Chute says “Writing is like meditation or going into an ESP trance, or prayer. Like dreaming. You are tapping into your unconscious. To be fully conscious and alert, with life banging and popping and cuckooing all around, you are not going to find your way to your subconscious, which is a place of complete submission. Complete submission.”
Ernest Hemingway was definitely the more organized of the two. Drake Baer writes that Hemingway had a specific routine for his writing. He would get up very early, pay attention, and protect his time by keeping distractions to a minimum. Ernest Hemmingway said “There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that.” I can relate to both Carolyn Chute and Ernest Hemingway in these articles. I work full time and go to college full time so you can say I have a busy life. I live at home with my family and we are on fairly different time schedules. You can imagine things might get tricky when it comes time to do my homework. I have friends who are always asking to spend time with me. Social media also plays a big role as one of my distractions. I think of myself in the beginning stages of writing. I have tons of room to improve and I am eager to learn. I believe you can get better at anything if you try. 6 Steps to avoid distractions and become a better writer: 1. Set quiet times to write. 2. Set the mood. Light a candle. Get comfortable. 3. Start early, as soon as the assignment is given. Even if that just means putting ideas onto paper. 4. Get feedback from others (professor, family, friends, peers). 5. Coffee or something else to drink depending on what time it is. 6. Track progress throughout the semester. Writing can be very intimidating for people like myself. I never know where to start or even have a clear image of where I want to go with my piece. After reading Why I Write by Joan Didion and other authors, I feel like I am not alone. Joan Didion is the well known author of books like “Run, River” or “Play it as it lays”. She describes herself as “not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on a piece of paper”. This gives me hope for my own writing.
I don’t often find myself writing an essay unless it’s for an English class like this one. However, writing is intertwined into my life in many ways. Like most people these days, I use texting to keep in contact with my friends and family. I use my email on a daily basis for various reasons. I also write “to-do lists” to help keep myself organized. I’ve written letters to my grandmother and other family members who live far away. I’m a bartender so sometimes I write down my customers food orders if they are complicated. I am very excited to see how my writing will bloom during this class. I am looking forward to finding new reasons to write. In her article, Joan Didion says “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear”. I’m hoping on finding out some of the answers to these questions myself. So the reasoning behind why I write is pretty much unknown to me at this point. As Joan Didion said, “Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.” |
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