Author Khanh Ha: January 2010

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Work-in-Progress

I haven’t blogged for some time.

The need to connect with the outside world has atrophied in me since I started working on my new novel.

I write every day, bright and early.

I never think past the scene I’m about to write that day.

I write that scene honestly well and that scene always breeds the next scene for the next day.

I don’t overwrite, for I know, as a reader, I like to participate in a scene.

I stop where I still have something to say so the next day I won’t face a dry well.

I read each day and in between my writing breaks to keep my mind off my own writing.

I don't believe in any other rules except mine.

There is another rule, though. I never talk about or show my work-in-progress. In my writer’s primitive mind, I understand that a novel is the whole assemblage of parts. A lyrically written passage might garner compliments from friends or blog readers, but it’s not the novel. I also understand that, again in a primitive way, I should never fall in love with my writing. Then I won’t have the urge to show my work piecemeal to anyone who would tell me that I can write. Well, I’m a writer. Why do I need to be told that I can write?

For those who are still unsure of themselves about their chosen trade, read this:

I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them. [Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast]

[Image source: http://motoxstores.com]

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Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time or all of the time they could afford it; mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named apéritifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

The Café des Amateurs was the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard, that wonderful narrow crowded market street which led into the Place Contrescarpe. The squat toilets of the old apartment houses, one by the side of the stairs on each floor with two cleated cement shoe-shaped elevations on each side of the aperture so a locataire would not slip, emptied into cesspools which were emptied by pumping into horse-drawn tank wagons at night. In the summer time, with all windows open, you would hear the pumping and the odor was very strong. The tank wagons were painted brown and saffron color and in the moonlight when they worked the rue Cardinal Lemoine their wheeled, horse-drawn cylinders looked like Braque paintings. No one emptied the Café des Amateurs though, and its yellowed poster stating the terms and penalties of the law against public drunkenness was as flyblown and disregarded as its clients were constant and ill-smelling.

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked.

—Ernest Hemingway (A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel)