Sometimes you have to starve before you feast
Easy Read
Struggle is front loaded into the
game of writing.
It’s a personal craft and writers are insecure creatures with a feral hunger of hitting the big time. Book deals, literature prizes, huge clients, validation from the greats.
But before the medals of valour, come the trenches.
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It’s true of all writers. Even the greatest to ever do the verbal tap dance had to suffer in the putrid mud for years.
When Ernest Hemingway lived in Paris in the 1920s he did so like a king. Earning keep from the articles he wrote for the Toronto Star, Hem was able to “live comfortably, eat at attractive restaurants and find amusement for a total expenditure of two and one half to three dollars a day.”
A life like that is easy to surrender to.
It’s how writers die.
Hemingway knew this. In A Moveable Feast, his ‘memoir’ of his time in Paris, he tells of quitting the Star to focus seriously on his writing.
He cast himself into uncertainty, “empty-bellied and hollow-hungry.”
I’ve flipped the pages on many of Hemingways prose but I love this book especially for allowing access to his clash with a relatable struggle. The writers struggle.
In it he peels back the veil of his usual chest-pounding self and reveals a writer who maps routes through Paris to avoid contact with food places because he was broke. Then he’d spend lunch starved in a museum.
He writes of a complete and desperate sharpness one could only achieve empty-bellied and at the end of the tether.
A discipline and a magic in the hunger.
In his own words:
“There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.”
The struggle was the difference in Hemingway becoming Hemingway and not another ‘good’ writer. It gave him impossible focus. Without it, life would have been cushy. Easy even. A distraction from the craft.
Hunger gave him the discipline to make it. The discipline to write classics like The Torrents of Spring or A Farewell to Arms in the 1920s. The discipline to write for his meals.
He had to, quite literally, starve before he could feast.
And, perhaps, this is something we should all try become more accustomed with.
Not starving yourself, or quitting your job or acting rashly. But to get out and gamble a bit more, take a few to the gob, swallow some blood. Know what it is to eat the dust of the world and still ask for seconds.
What separates the greats from these other chickadees is this willingness to stare down the struggle and crack on.
Those capable of that, you’ll find, are the ones who hone their craft regardless if it’s read by the masses or by themselves, alone, in empty rooms. Starving and struggling.
Those capable of that go by the name of Hemingway, Bukowski, King, Joyce, Miller, Saroyan, Cummings, Steinbeck, Austen. Or, more appropriately — the Greats.
Anyway.
By Ryan Heaney.
