Shut Up, Hemingway

 

“Writ­ing is rewrit­ing.” — Ernest Hem­ing­way

 

Yeah, yeah, I know the sto­ry about the last chap­ter of Hem­ing­way’s A Farewell to Arms—that he alleged­ly rewrote it 39 times before he was sat­is­fied with it.

I say “alleged­ly” because I’ve also read accounts in which he rewrote the last page 39 times, and oth­ers in which he rewrote the entire book 39 times. More like­ly he drank 39 cock­tails, shot 39 clay pigeons, caught 39 mar­lins and rewrote the same word 39 times.

Why am I blath­er­ing on about Hem­ing­way’s edi­to­r­i­al habits? Because I’m in the mid­dle (exact­ly the mid­dle) of the SEVENTH draft of my new nov­el, and I’m get­ting a lit­tle tired of rewrit­ing. I want to be…oh, I don’t know…WRITING some­thing new, oth­er­wise known as CREATING. I’ve been por­ing over indi­vid­ual sen­tences for two weeks, and the result­ing effect on my eyes and brain is sim­i­lar to snow blind­ness.

Recent­ly I read a quote by best­seller Michael Crich­ton about rewrit­ing and his sense of despair about it. I was impressed that he’d gone on the record about this dread­ed sub­ject because I’ve found that a lot of very suc­cess­ful authors like to keep the pro­duc­tion of their works a mys­tery to con­vey that it real­ly isn’t all that hard. This is what I call the “writer as auteur” or the “folks don’t want to see how the sausages are made” school of thought.

Any­way, here’s what Crich­ton had to say (which does­n’t bode well for me—there will prob­a­bly be an 8th draft—I’m used to it):

 

“Books aren’t written—they’re rewritten.…It is one of the hard­est things to accept, espe­cial­ly after the sev­enth rewrite has­n’t quite done it.”

 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go decide whether to use a loose or peri­od­ic sen­tence in the para­graph I’m work­ing on.

Hope­ful­ly I won’t have to rewrite the f‑cker 39 times.

Before I go, I want to leave you with an entire­ly dif­fer­ent kind of Hem­ing­way quote—one that shows he was­n’t always Mr. Seri­ous Writer:

 

“Got tight last night on absinthe. Did knife tricks.” —Hem­ing­way, in a let­ter to a friend

 

 

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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