NaNo Update & Hemingway's 4 Rules for Writers

Hemingway’s Four Rules (learned while he was a young reporter with the Kansas City Star)

1. Use short sentences.
2. Use short first paragraphs.
3. Use vigorous English.
4. Be positive, not negative.

“Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” Hemingway said in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them.”

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Great advice for NaNo writers; except rule number 1 blots out the fruitless, hopeless, desperate attempt to lay on the adjectives to beef up word count. Ahem. I think today I shall let my dog stomp on the keyboard and write for me.

The plot thickens in Mrs. Boyd this week as we have Charlie Boyd rushed into marriage. (In Madame Bovary, Charles Bovary is married off to a wealthy woman chosen by his mother, but she dies soon after, leaving Charles free to marry again.) This chapter is a short one that begins with his marriage and ends with him inadvertently meeting his future wife, Gemma.

Nora and Charlie married in a simple, poorly attended ceremony at sunset on the white wrap-around porch of their house. In their wedding photograph, Nora is smiling, chin up like she’s won a Best-In-Show ribbon at the State Fair and Charlie, in his father’s ill-fitting suit, is squinting toward the sun, giving him the look of someone doing a poor Clint Eastwood impression. A daughter with tiny black curls and sea-blue eyes, Emmeline, was born five months later.