Tip #1: One Piece At a Time

In Ernest Hemingway on Writing, I read a small comment Hemingway once made, which I'll now paraphrase. Basically, Hemingway said, it takes me all morning to write a paragraph, 500 words. This made him doubt whether he'd ever be able to write something as long as a novel. In fact, Hemingway is remembered for his short stories, but his novels are also much lauded, including A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and The Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls. That last, actually, weighs in at over 500 pages in the edition sitting on my bookshelf right now. So, with a careful eye for language and an obsessive habit of re-writing (most if not all writers have this, to a greater or lesser extent), how did Hemingway finally write something so long?

My theory is that he wrote the books "one piece at a time," the same way Johnny Cash got his Cadillac in the song of the same name. A sentence here, then another, and another. One chapter at a time, maybe; the first chapter of For Whom the Bell Tolls is only 17 pages, which is maybe, I think, 2 short stories worth of writing. Not much happens except the young man (Robert Jordan) and the old man (Anselmo) inspect the mill-house. Then they climb on and meet Pablo, who becomes one of the novel's more troubling characters. There is also a 4 page flashback (!) where Robert Jordan remembers his conversation with the Russian, Golz, who has sent him on this mission. That's pretty much it. The setting is detailed; the people are detailed. The central conflict of the novel (blowing up the bridge) is pretty well established.

For me, when working on a novel, the sheer vastness of it can be daunting, this goal of putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order. A hundred thousand words! But if you take, say, 3,000 words, then, by God, maybe you can get something done. In the example I've given above, think how much longer For Whom the Bell Tolls is than its first 17 pages, and how much more complex. If you're a novelist, and you're struggling with the vastness, the emptiness of those pages you need to fill, then slow down, be calm, and remember to write one word at a time, one piece at a time, or, as Anne Lamott suggests in her book on writing, bird by bird.