"A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins smooth flesh with rain freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought."
-Ernest Hemingway, "A Movable Feast"
I know exactly what he is talking about here, except for the pencil and the Earth shattering talent parts.
Something I have always wondered about-has the word processor fundamentally changed the act of writing? I wonder if the intense focus you need to type up handwritten manuscript pages on a typewriter made the writing different? Whereas now, with editing orders of magnitude easier, we write differently-more sloppy, less precise?
(For you kids-a "typewriter" was a mechanical device for putting words on a sheet of paper. Google it.)
I still scribble in spiral notebooks... have boxes full of them, boxes of words. I keep one and mechanical pencils in my car... just in case. But I must confess that the computer is where I do the lion's share of writing these days. It is just plain faster and time is short.
ReplyDeleteFew words truer than that.
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