The Stories in Hemingway's Coffee

Of course, the topic of writing in cafes has come up on this blog before. I thought, though, you would enjoy this piece by Jane Sullivan in The Age. She talks about how cafes have long nurtured the writer's craft and provided the sort of distractions that soak into the fiction.

This description is particularly lovely :

On a cold, rainswept day in Paris, Ernest Hemingway went into a good cafe he knew on the Place St Michel. He ordered a cafe au lait, took out his notebook and began to write a story about boys in Michigan. The boys in the story were drinking and that made him thirsty, so he ordered a rum St James. Then a pretty girl came in and sat at a table by the window. Hemingway looked at her and was disturbed and excited. He went on writing, ordered another rum St James and watched the girl whenever he looked up or sharpened his pencil. He entered far into his story and was lost in it. Then it was finished. He knew it was a good story, he was very tired and sad and the girl had gone. He ordered a half-carafe of white wine and a dozen oysters and, as he ate and drank, began to be happy and to make plans.

She also writes about how The Australian Poetry Centre is introducing a Cafe Poet Program, where the selected poet in each state or territory is invited to sit as "poet in residence" in a cafe in their city for six months, with free tea and coffee provided. Not a bad job for someone!

By the way, one book I have been longing to buy for sometime is Noel Reiley Fitch's Grand Literary Cafe's of Europe. True biblioporn.

Short and Sweet

Janet Tay in today's Starmag writes about novellas - Little Books, Big Punches she calls them.

She strongly recommends to local readers (as I strongly endorse!) :

• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915) (read online here)
  
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937) (read online here)
  
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (1958)

and reviews each of them. (In the print version of the newspaper, there is a 30% voucher for each of these titles from Kinokuniya.)

Two recent novellas I would add are Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both shortlisted recently for the Booker prize.

I last wrote about novellas here and really do think they are a great way in to serious fiction for the reader who may be put off by the length of a full-length novel.

Write Like Hemingway

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed ...

as Ernest Hemingway once said.

I really loved this list of gems of writing wisdom gleaned from Hemingway posted by writing coach Joanna Young on the Confident Writing website :

• 1 Start with the simplest things
• 2 Boil it down
• 3 Know what to leave out
• 4 Write the tip of the ice-berg, leave the rest under the water
• 5 Watch what happens today
• 6 Write what you see
• 7 Listen completely
• 8 Write when there is something you know, and not before
• 9 Look at words as if seeing them for the first time
• 10 Use the most conventional punctuation you can
• 11 Ditch the dictionary
• 12 Distrust adjectives
• 13 Learn to write a simple declarative sentence
• 14 Tell a story in six words
• 15 Write poetry into prose
• 16 Read everything so you know what you need to beat
• 17 Don't try to beat Shakespeare
• 18 Accept that writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done
• 19 Go fishing in summer
• 20 Don't drink when you're writing
• 21 Finish what you start
• 22 Don't worry. You've written before and you will write again
• 23 Forget posterity. Think only of writing truly
• 24 Write as well as you can with no eye on the market
• 25 Write clearly - and people will know if you are being true
• 26 Just write the truest sentence that you know
• 27 Remember that nobody really knows or understands the secret

Any of these you can particularly identify with?

If you need more writing inspiration, you might like to look back to this list of advice from Keroac.