View of the room used by Earnest Hemingway to write in Key West, Florida.
In February, Holyagnostic and She Who Must Be Obeyed decided to hop in the Silver Bullet and point it toward the South until the thermometer that measured the outside temperature registered at least seventy degrees.
They made no specific plans other than a goal for the amount spent each day, a rough route that eventually would bring them to Key West, Florida. The meager preparation made every day a new adventure with an abundance of choices. Tallahassee, Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater, Naples, Bocca Raton, Key West, Miami, and Lake City were the stops. They then took short excursions from their base camps in each location.
Key West provided the temperatures for which their quest had begun. And just off Duval street, Holy encountered the ghost of Earnest Hemingway and the guilt trip began.
Holy writes something almost every day. A personal journal with a 36 year history and scores of books are filled with the minutiae about what he experiences, thinks, feels, and has opinions.
Holy also has an Algonquin Round Table that cusses and discusses the goings on in the world. You are invited to join. Test your ideas and thoughts with some really sharp people who remain as anonymous as they want to be. We go by avatar names Check us out by clicking here. At one time a strip search was a requirement to make sure that potential joiners are not planning to become spammers. The test is not that strict these days.
Facebook is another place where Holy exercises some additional scribbling, but he admits that it is a medium that he really doesn't like. He is not wanting to play with farm animals or grow crops. He isn't really interested in the pictures that you took of your drunk boyfriend. Triviality rules the day. Is it because Holy has the wrong friends?
OK, there have been some reintroductions to some people from long lost years in the past. Those years were populated by these old friends as we explored the world which was mostly concerned with the monumental struggle of coming of age. Those contacts with distant people from what now seems to be another planet,have been good. It gives a look at the trajectory of our lives
In addition, most days usually include some comments at blog sites and in response to an occasional newspaper or magazine story.
The Holyagnostic blog is reserved for the times when an experience, thought, opinion, or feeling is worth exploring in longer form depth. It is the most difficult of the writing that Holy does. In all of the other places the flow of words are mostly "stream of consciousness", off the cuff, quickly thrown out for consumption. But here he gives careful consideration to the crafting of the sentences and the flow of the ideas. Even the sound and cadence become important. Holy reads the content out loud in order to attempt to duplicate the voice that will be heard in the reader's head. In other words, it's hard work.
And here came Hemingway out of the mist of time to lay the guilt trip. The guide at the writer's home in Key West was giving Holy and SWMBO the spiel. They were standing with a group of about fifteen others.
"He would leave the main house in the morning and go to the room he reserved for writing. The 'office' was located in an adjacent building on the second floor. He had a walkway built so that he wouldn't have to climb the stairs."
Then this one who had memorized this sum of brief details about Hemmingway said it, "He wrote 700 words a day and then went to Sloppy Joe's, a bar that was then located a few blocks north, to drink, talk, and sometimes gather a group to go fishing or boxing."
"Seven hundred words a day," said the guide.
Holy thought, "That's all?"
From the question came this post. How hard could it be to write such a small amount every day?
Earnest Hemingway's experience in posting as a war correspondent, demanded short concise editing for the stories transferred by telegraph. Those stories needed to be about 700 words. The habit continued into his novels.
There. It's done. Seven hundred words, by golly. And it only took four and a half weeks! Holy is off to Sloppy Joe's. He knows this is the way to his own Old Man and the Sea.
Nice, 700 hundred words allowed "The Old Man" to spend more time fish'n.
Posted by: Garry Morgan | May 04, 2011 at 08:45 AM
Gave him more time to drink, too. When the original Sloppy Joe's moved down the block to another location, Hemingway brought one of the urinals home and set it up as yard art. He said, "I have poured enough money down this thing to own it."
Posted by: Holyagnostic | May 20, 2011 at 09:27 AM