Per my previous post on my efforts to work my way through the reading list in Master Class in Fiction Writing by Adam Sexton, I triumphantly slammed the cover shut on The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway yesterday. It's the first Hemingway I've read since high school when I thought to my young self "Hey! A racist AND a sexist, great stuff."
After doing the post-school runaround I settled in with the Sexton book to see what I had learned about the elusive "voice" as illustrated by Papa Hemingway.
Only to realize that I was supposed to have read A Farewell to Arms.
Noooooooo! So now it's back to the library to pick up ANOTHER Hemingway novel. I am really suffering for my craft.
In the meantime I started to reread Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, one of the writers I admire most because she makes it all seem so easy: the historical accuracy, the compelling characters, the beautiful language.
I was struck by one of Sexton's observations about the relationship between writers and novels: if you figure that an average novel is 300 pages long, and a reader can manage 30 pages at most per sitting, you've got to write a book that will engage the reader ten separate times to drop everything else and pick up your book. In Brooks' case, I couldn't even stop until page 100 - and I've read this before and know what happens. Better, for me anyway, than with Hemingway where I keep flipping to the last page to see how much longer I have to go...
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