The mental version has a soundtrack. It has the storyboarding of Production IG and Guillermo Del Toro colors. The written version is made of stiff cardboard, cut out of shipping boxes, scribbled with crayon in the later passes.
How well I know that feeling :-)
It sounds to me as if what Hemingway is talking about is the process of 'writing oneself in', i.e. writing any old rubbish until you get something worthwhile and the work starts to flow, on the assumption that you can always edit out/throw away the bad bits later on. It's supposed to be a way over writer's block, and certainly I find that getting a passage started is often the hardest part. (I don't normally throw away work: I just go very, very, very slowly, constructing endless sentence fragments in my head, sometimes putting a few of them down on paper and almost immediately crossing them out. Sometimes I do look back at it the next day and just scribble the whole paragraph out and go in a different direction, though.)
The idea of retelling and 'rewriting familiarity' is interesting from my point of view, because this is my experience -- due to historical accident, this is the way I've almost always worked. Tell the story once (without writing anything down), then write it a second time with foreknowledge of which parts lead into which and which snippets of dialogue are significant, i.e. all the Really Memorable Parts.
But unlike the Guy with the Fish, I find there are diminishing returns to be had: the second telling is invariably better than the first (because it has all the highlights of the original make-it-up-as-you-go-along story with a retrospective structure imposed on it and a lot of extra incidental detail added), but subsequent retellings dimish in zest and enjoyment.
As for literally rewriting from the beginning each day... ouch. (At the risk of sounding like the Four Yorkshiremen, 500 words is my target for a good day!)
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2016-02-07 08:59 pm (UTC)How well I know that feeling :-)
It sounds to me as if what Hemingway is talking about is the process of 'writing oneself in', i.e. writing any old rubbish until you get something worthwhile and the work starts to flow, on the assumption that you can always edit out/throw away the bad bits later on. It's supposed to be a way over writer's block, and certainly I find that getting a passage started is often the hardest part. (I don't normally throw away work: I just go very, very, very slowly, constructing endless sentence fragments in my head, sometimes putting a few of them down on paper and almost immediately crossing them out. Sometimes I do look back at it the next day and just scribble the whole paragraph out and go in a different direction, though.)
The idea of retelling and 'rewriting familiarity' is interesting from my point of view, because this is my experience -- due to historical accident, this is the way I've almost always worked. Tell the story once (without writing anything down), then write it a second time with foreknowledge of which parts lead into which and which snippets of dialogue are significant, i.e. all the Really Memorable Parts.
But unlike the Guy with the Fish, I find there are diminishing returns to be had: the second telling is invariably better than the first (because it has all the highlights of the original make-it-up-as-you-go-along story with a retrospective structure imposed on it and a lot of extra incidental detail added), but subsequent retellings dimish in zest and enjoyment.
As for literally rewriting from the beginning each day... ouch. (At the risk of sounding like the Four Yorkshiremen, 500 words is my target for a good day!)