Paying The Rent

It’s a windy Sunday around 1:15pm.  I have a load of clothes in the washer in the laundry room downstairs.  The apartment building is pretty quiet.  I’m drinking beer and watching the Giants on TV.  The Steelers don’t come on until 4:15pm.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to send in a rent payment this week.  I don’t even know how many months I’m behind in my rent; but when I get my first social security check in December I’ll be able to pay my rent every month.  Things are bad.  I keep going to these job interviews but I still don’t have a job.  The economy is bad.  I’m proud that I got my MFA in writing from Pitt in 2006 but so far it hasn’t done me much good.

GHH

The Impact Of Hemingway

Okay, if you don’t know it already you know it now.  I’m obsessed with Hemingway.  All you have to do to know it’s true is to read the stories on this blog.  There is the concrete language, the back and forth dialogue and the minimal exposition.  Exposition is explanation and a writer should never have to explain what characters are doing.  If the the writer draws the characters clearly through what they say and do no explanation is necessary.  The reader will get it.

I guess what Hemingway really taught me was to trust the reader.

14 Great Stories To Read

There are 14 short stories on this blog for your reading pleasure.  Just go to the sidebar and under Categories click on “Flash Fiction Stories.”  Once you read to the bottom of a page of stories just click on the link you find at the bottom to read more stories.  You can do this until you’ve read all the stories on the site.  The stories are:

Boobs

The Hemingway Hero

When I Was A Young Man

La Dolce Vita

The Cathedral Of Learning

The End Of Innocence

The Twenty Dollar Suit

In The Shadow Of The Cathedral Of Learning

Life Is Art

Pittsburgh Snow

California Dreamin’

Oakland Nights

Uptown

Schenley Park

Flash Fiction & The Sun Also Rises

By far my favorite writer is Ernest Hemingway and my favorite novel is The Sun Also Rises. So far I must have read the book over thirty times. There was one summer when I was a young man and trying to find my voice as a writer that I read The Sun Also Rises at least six times. I would read it and put it away and then become lonely for the characters and read the book again.

I was amazed that an entire novel could be written in that athletic, stripped-down, concrete language Hemingway used. I have never come across another novel that used such a whirlwind of down to earth surface action “to map the inner, emotional landscape” of its wonderfully individualized characters. These were real people. Not because the author told you they were real but because he showed you through their actions that they were real. The characters, even the animals and the landscape, projected the themes of the novel. There was very little exposition in the book; hardly anything is explained. It was all so real. It was all so life like.

So, even though I’m committed to the flash fiction form, it was The Sun Also Rises that showed me how to project my vision of humankind within the confines of 1,000 words.

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