Where do I start?
Usually, the answer to that question is at the beginning. But if every story began at the beginning and ended at the end, no story would ever start or finish.
So, I’ll start here: Last week, for my English class focusing on Modernism and the Lost Generation, I had to read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. “Had to” doesn’t feel right. It makes it sound like I was forced to. And I promise I wasn’t. Last August or September, I might’ve said otherwise, but not now.
When I first read Hemingway with the same professor last semester, I thought his work had no substantial plot. He wrote about houses and lakes and I was bored easily.
It took a while for me to understand that Hemingway was less about plot, and more about setting. The stories were laid out in broad daylight. I just had to search for the meaning myself. Symbols and metaphors and all that.
And though it took me a while, I eventually understood why we were reading Hemingway and now recognize him as one of our world’s greatest writers that ever lived.
But even more than for the fact that he was a good writer in terms of technique and style, I admire him because he was an honest writer.
In A Moveable Feast, he revealed that when he had writer’s block, he told himself, “‘All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know'” and the rest would write itself.
So, that’s where I’ll start.
Everyday, I’ll write the most true thing I know that day.
And we’ll see where it takes us…
– Samhi C.
