Because we read Joan Didion who mentions Ernest Hemingway and because I also love his writing, I’m adding a link to our website for the Paris Review interview with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was an American novelist. He was also a journalist and lived in Paris after volunteering as an an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War. His major works include For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms and the Old Man and the Sea, after which he won the Nobel Prize in 1954.
“From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?”
On committing to writing as habit, he says of his process:
“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. 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 . . . .”