Even great writers, maybe especially great writers, struggle with their craft. It comes with the territory of developing voice and skills, and wrestling with the imagination. Ernest Hemingway developed this strategy for overcoming writer’s block–he’d write one true sentence. In A Moveable Feast, he says:
Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out 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 that 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 found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.
A suggestion for this week: free write for 15 minutes, no editing, no crossing out.
Read over your writing and select the sentence that “pops out” the most to you–maybe the verb vibrates, evokes an emotion, or an image. Put that “true” sentence at the top of a page and free write for another 15 minutes from that starting point.
Thanks to an “Openculture” article for the Hemingway quote.
Send us your free writing, either anonymously or by name and we’ll select some for publication in this newsletter! Send submissions to fuzemeg@rocketmail.com.
