The Practice of Poetry

 In Hemingway’s seminal work, A Moveable Feast, he speaks about the methods that helped him write when he was a young writer living in 1920s Paris. At the beginning of the memoir, he reminisces,  

“It was wonderful to walk down the long flight of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going… I would stand and look over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I could hat I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written” (12). 

What is fascinating to me is that he braces himself against serious worry about not being able to produce new material, and he does so in a variety of ways. First, he broke down the process into baby steps—one true sentence at a time. Second, he says 

 ”…I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it” (13).  

He would stop only when he had a clear understanding of how he needed to proceed—and then he would do everything he could to distract himself so that his subconscious could be left alone to do its magic. He knew that if he didn’t make this off-time part of his schedule, he would become useless with anxiety.  

Finally, the less overt element of his writing schedule is luck. He recalls the feeling of leaving his work at the end of the day and “Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that need luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris” (13).  

Luck and discipline: his philosophy mixes stubbornness and hopefulness. Applying his methods to my own writing has been helpful. I’ve come to trust the work that is taking place in my unconscious mind. Right before going to sleep, I often read my latest draft. It still amazes me when the answer is there in the morning. I also find that I “solve” a lot of writing problems when I am doing something else—exercising, taking a shower, or other tasks that occupy the body, but not the mind. Consistent writing habits seem to require equanimity; we push, we rest, we push again. And hopefully, we’re lucky too.

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