Silence, listening, reading...

This post is going to be a little rambling, as sometimes my posts are. I have not had silence for weeks and maybe months and most people in their daily lives do not have a lot of silence. I think writers need more silent times than other people. These are the times when we are thinking, creating, dreaming and hearing the voices of our characters or seeing our characters lounging on their couches, or arguing with their partners, or crying or laughing, basically, and weirdly, they are living.

I love this quote from Kate Eltham from the QWC (I am loving what she writes on the covering letter every month, I never used to read them and now I always read her musings.) which says:

"... writers who understand. They understand that I'm staring vacantly out the window because I'm thinking about my story, and not because I am a bit funny in the head. They understand that it is normal to have conversations (out loud) with my characters when I'm driving to work. They understand because they, too, are writers." (July QWC Newsletter).

Hemingway talks about listening to Gertrude Stein rant and rave about other authors and writing, even though he didn't agree with her. He just listened anyway. Listening is a lost art, I think. People exchanging ideas and politely listening until others have finished.

An inheritance that I hate the most from television, videos, games, music, modern culture is the way we don't listen to each other anymore. It's like our attention span is zero! That is what I notice about the current situation. However, there are people who listen well and these people are less exhausting to be around. I like to hear about other people's lives and stories. We will not learn anything if we lose this art altogether. It will just be about our own opinions and views on the world and there is not exchange of relationship or ideas. There is nothing interchanged between the people in conversation unless they both listen at some point to one another.

I had a great trip to Brisbane on Monday, in which I met with my friend Jenni Messina. We chatted about writing our novels, our occasional impatience with the process and our writing styles. It was wonderful to be with another person who feels the same as me and listen to her experiences and finding they were similar to mine. This is always good.

As a side point: I was extremely chuffed by Veny's comment about my chapter from my novel that it was: "extremely evocative."

Hemmingway came down to Melbourne with me...

I have recently picked up A Moveable Feast by Hemingway and I am enjoying it immensely.

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." (Ernest Hemingway to a friend in 1950).

It is so easy to read his first person style. It flows well and is very relaxed not like some of Hemingway's short stories that can be aggressive and abrasive. But this little book is enjoyable and also very powerful. I loved Paris when I was there in 2001 just after September 11, it was as if nothing dramatic had happened in the world and nothing would touch that city.

It is amusing to read about Gertrude Stein criticising Hemingway's style of writing and saying that he was of the Lost Generation. It talks about how Hemingway and his wife deal with their poverty and about their everyday lives and about the fisher people on the Seine River. It is candid and charming.

"Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only true sad time in Paris because it was unnatural...Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again...When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed."

There are other observations of his relationship with his wife and how they spend their time and money. I can really relate to what he is talking about. He seems like a friend of mine, someone who understands how an artistic person feels about life.

It is unlike any other Hemingway I have read. He is a free spirited and generous person in this book. It is refreshing to hear about his life in Paris with authors such as F Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce and others. To me it is a gem of a book, beautifully and soulfully written.