Whilst reading Ernest Hemingway...

The initial journey was difficult. The characters, French names and places were leaden and inaccessible, dull even - nay boring! At Gertrude Stein she almost gave up. The language impenetrable in its closeness, suffocating and too near, like he was dropping each word into her ear.
Then she reached the cafes. It changed and she sat at the wooden table with a small yellow coffee in front of her and watched as artists walked past and Scott Fitzgerald joined him and her.

The cafe smelled of wine and meat. (As she slipped out of the car she kissed her hair and smelled shampoo).

How had Hemingway gotten so close to her? Each individual movement and sense conveyed to her as naturally as breathing. The Paris street sparse and sepia, a time long past; she had to keep reminding herself that it was the 1920s.

He was frequently hungry, he was a gambler. He had a wife who called him Tatie and that rang in her head over and over, Tatie. Her voice, becalming, annoyingly calm, unnaturally measured and sensible, only served to heighten his ability. Why did she call him Tatie? So close to potato.

She had wanted to write and reading H she had been lulled, like so many others, into believing it was now all so simple. Just speak from the senses and record all in uncluttered prose. And yet, and yet. How to catch each sensory impression, most gone as soon as felt. But the snow on her trousers which struck to the bottom had been a turning point. After all the showy prose and adjectives it was the simple line, 'snow covered the bottom of my jeans' which truly captured that snowy day and their laboured walk. It was at that moment as the image flashed into her mind that she understood. The small details, the honesty, captured the moment, conveyed the feeling.

Back to H. The cafes and the waiters. The stillness of Paris, the words ,the language. Would she ever be able to create fiction? To marry language, character and plot? She worried; language was hard enough, H had deceived her here. But what did she know of characters, people, how to conjure them? And plot! Well she hadn't any idea there although Bill Bryson had done well just embellishing his own plots! And what about those writers like Enid Blyton who swore they just sat down, typewriter on knees, and poured out the words direct and formed from their heads - the stories already written and just recorded - just like that. Apparently Sebastian Faulks had just written Engleby like that. A voice in his head dictated it. Like Enid Blyton. Sometimes she had a voice in her head and it sounded brilliant but when she came to record it the words stumbled and chafed and would not cooperate. They arrived clumsily and refused to sit in the beautiful harmony formed earlier in her head. Auditory versus actually writing had not yet melded for her.

And then there was tension. She was halfway through a short story by H about a big game hunter and his clients who wanted to shoot big game in Africa. H set out the tension of the husband and wife - his vulnerability , her brittleness and femaleness and the hunter's omnipotence - the husband and wife his prey just as much as the lion and buffalo.
Bloody Hemingway - why did he have to overturn every precept of writing which she had carefully and systematically stored up and honed and practised. Now adjectives seemed riduculous and childish, to be used carefully and sparingly. In short they were NOT the main things, not the important creatures she had supposed and been taught and herself had taught children. It was nouns which counted; the direct and precise noun, so as to convey as much as possible with the virtue of brevity. But had not H even sometimes cast this aside? She didn't think he had mentioned 'trees' as such but she felt sure he had introduced a table as just that - a 'table'. And the verb to be. 'Don't use it, do exercises to exorcise it. It robs your wrting of vigour' - but H was full of it. Sentence after sentence poured out using was and were. It was this very technique which lulled and beguiled so successully and seduced the reader into intimacy. She stored it away - if H could do it, well so could she - only sometimes when the voice was right and truthful. She thought wryly of all those American writing books which exhorted one to adjectives, description and giddy indulgent wordiness. But then how could one pare back without first over-egging?
Back to H. She knew he would always stay with her now. He would travel in her head and smile sympathetically as she used those wasses and weres. He was another seed implanted in her brain to beef up the future mixture which one day would emerge as her style , her voice.