INTERVIEWER: Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?
HEMINGWAY: 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.
INTERVIEW IN THE PARIS REVIEW
I loathe routine. I find pleasure in the uncertainty of not knowing what the next day will bring. Ergo, I have multiple projects running at the same time, so I can switch from one to the other depending on what catches my fancy on the day. I like to derive pleasure from each activity, to wrestle not with the pressure of keeping up with a routine but untying the knots of a concept or a project I have not yet mastered fully.
While reading Hemingway’s interview in The Paris Review, Springs 1958, I became aware of my lack of routine in that strict sense of the word. What I do enjoy is the flow, where I lose all sense of time, a complete immersion. I resonate with Hemingway’s description of his process as such:
When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you LOVE.
Interview in The Paris Review
A question oft asked is if it is not too mentally straining to be working on multiple things and not be distracted by one undone task when you take up the other one. Hemingway said it took discipline to be able to compartmentalise. I look at it as having faith. To not mull too much over not having finished it. I believe I will take my time with it. It could be tomorrow or some other day. If it is important enough, I will do it.
Motivation, on the other hand, is a fickle thing and as long as I base it on something outside of me, that is where I will keep looking for it. It has to flow from within, not too controlled, not entirely left to its own device, either. And, if you are still looking for something to get you going, here’s a line for you.
As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.
Interview in The Paris Review
So, just start! Take it where it will go and leave it there.
I was forwarded some of these interviews, which have been published over the years at The Paris Review by a friend. After having read Hemingway’s interview, I picked up Joan Didion’s. I am fascinated by her, and I never lose an opportunity to say that out loud. I am sure no one cares but that’s never a deterrent. And, I experience childlike excitement over a mention of an author by another, especially if I am currently reading something by him or her. It never ceases to amuse me.
In that moment, I forget that the author is not a nobody, and that their having known of each other’s existence is nothing out of the ordinary.
At the mention of Hemingway by Didion, I was plucked out of my reality and wedged, happily so, between the two. I felt like I had met Hemingway first and then ran into Didion later, and it was I who she was talking to. And we were all old friends, happy at the mention of one by another. Of course, there are some we can’t stand and others we choose to ignore. But mostly we get along fine.
INTERVIEWER: Did any writer influence you more than others?
DIDION: I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to learn how the sentences worked. I taught myself to type at the same time. A few years ago when I was teaching a course at Berkeley I reread A Farewell to Arms and fell right back into those sentences. I mean they’re perfect sentences. Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.
INTERVIEW IN THE PARIS REVIEW
And to think Hemingway wrote the last of A Farewell to Arms several times before he was satisfied!
Read the complete essays on The Paris Review:
Joan Didion’s Interview in The Paris Review, Ernest Hemingway’s Interview in The Paris Review