Columns

Inside Out: My big beer ad writer moment

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

That was Ernest Hemingway’s advice on how to write. It comes in “A Moveable Feast,” an enchanting book about his life in Paris that nevertheless is brimming with some nasty gossip about people who thought at the time they were his friends.

He, of course, comes across as a humble hero, a very reasonable, charming, thoughtful and kind young fellow whose genius is about to send him on to fame and fortune. He already had a fortune to rely on — his wife’s — but you’d think the two of them could barely afford porridge. It’s funny how they manage to hang out in Paris cafés and go skiing in the Alps.

Writing one true sentence and telling the truth, it appears, can be two different things.

I love the book anyway. I love Hemingway, too, despite his obvious flaws as a human being. He’s one of my
heros as a writer, which makes clear how old I am and how little I’ve learned about contemporary fiction, which I admit I have trouble getting into. I rarely read novels these days. I know that’s bad — not just for me, but for the business, if I speak for others.

I tried one recent best seller, “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett. I thought the concept was great but the execution much less than stellar. The story unfolds and the characters emerge in snippets of dialogue, it seems to me. There were very few well developed scenes. It was mostly telling rather than showing — a cardinal sin in fiction writing, according to the lessons I was taught by English teachers in my school days. I stopped more than halfway through the book. I just wasn’t engaged. Instead I re-read “The Great Gatsby,” the perfection of which always astonishes me.

My wife thinks my take on “The Help” is ridiculous. I know several other women who loved it, too. It’s not a blockbuster-soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture for nothing. Clearly I’m missing something.

Hemingway had his bias. He was a relentless self-promoter, which is probably as much a reason for his success as his talent. He made connections and he worked them. He clearly didn’t hang out at Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris because he liked her.

I’ve looked back over this column so far to see how well I’m doing with Hemingway’s challenge. I haven’t created a work of art but I think I have written a string of true sentences. What defines a “true sentence” changes, depending on the work at hand. This is an essay meant only to mildly entertain or amuse readers of a weekly newspaper. The bar goes higher for news stories. Writing a lead that is absolutely true is a lot harder than the non-journalist might suppose. Try to tell not only what happened, but why it matters, in one true sentence or even paragraph. It’s fairly easy to get close to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and yet it’s usually very hard to nail it right on the head. Once you do, the story is easy to write, as Hemingway goes on to say in that old advice to himself he recites in “A Moveable Feast.”

He was talking about fiction, of course — the Nick Adams stories, some of which are astonishing in their crystalline brilliance. He considered journalism “the first rough draft of history.” He also said “the first draft of anything is s–t.” So there you have it.

This from the guy whose photo hangs in a funky Key West bookstore window. It’s in an early 1950s Ballantine beer ad. He’s sitting there at Finca Vigia, I guess — his place in Cuba — out on the terrace in a comfortable chair, a book open in his lap. There’s no beer by his side in the photo. It’s nearby in the layout, however, along with a letter in which the future Nobel prize-winner writes, “You have to work hard to deserve to drink it. But I would rather have a bottle of Ballantine Ale than any other drink after fighting a really big fish. When something has been taken out of you by strenuous exercise, Ballantine puts it back in.”

Take that for one true sentence or two from the fellow who would win the Nobel prize three years later for “The Old Man and the Sea.” I re-read that recently, too, after giving up on somebody else’s new novel. I loved it. Maybe it’s not “A Farewell to Arms”; maybe it’s a little too calculated. But I thought it was great. The narrator grabbed me and took me away. That’s what I ask of a book.

When I write Town Board stories and other news pieces for the Reporter, I strive to write one true sentence after another not because I am a noble soul but I dread corrections and yelling. It’s the only way to cover myself against errors of commission, as well as errors of omission, inference and nuance. It’s not easy to write the absolute truth; and yet it’s very easy to put in, or leave out, something that will make a story less than accurate.

In spite of Hemingway’s implied contempt for journalism, I think this craft has taught me a lot about how to write “one true sentence.” Every skill that applies to producing a good news story applies to writing fiction, too, I think.

I wrote a novel during the time I took off between editing jobs a year or so ago, the kind of book I’d love to read myself (and that may be why it stands little chance of being picked up by a publisher). It was tough work, grueling at times, more so than any news story can be, with many rewrites and tweaks and polishes. I think I succeeded — at least in feeling, in the end, that I’d been totally honest on every page. Staying true and honest in fiction is terribly hard. With a news story, you’ll be okay once you get yourself rolling down the tracks with a good and true lead. With fiction, the tracks keep coming to an end in the middle of nowhere.

There: a little shameless self-promotion, à la Mr. Hemingway. With a little help from Google, a pitch such as this may sell a copy or two. And who knows: maybe my new book’s literary champion will come swooping in out of nowhere.