Hemingway and Me

I have always enjoyed writing. My first novel, written when I was seven, was called The Girlfriends. It was a mystery printed on ten wide-lined pages in pencil. I cannot remember the plot details because, alas, it was lost sometime in the last seventy years. These things happen in life. I know how Hemingway felt when his first unpublished masterpiece was lost in 1922 by his wife on a train in Europe. Did I just compare myself to Hemingway? Yes. Not that our significance to literary posterity is similar but because we both are scribblers, people who love words and live in them. That’s what this blog and our book, Telling Lies and Sharing Secrets, is all about – sharing our enchantment with words and the worlds they conjure.

Being a lover of words I have, at hand, books about words and grammar. My new favorite is Dreyer’s English, An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer. Does that sound boring? I dare you to read more than a few pages without chuckling and eventually belly-rocking. Toss away your Strunk and White. Dreyer’s book is vastly more entertaining and equally edifying. It is a laugh-out-loud book of passion for the English language. I do not exaggerate. I read passages to several friends, non-literary types, and elicited the same response. Who knew a comma or an apostrophe, not to mention a preposition, could be so much fun? Just as Mary Poppins sang, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way.”

Happy writing everyone. We hope you find your journey in writing is loaded with ah-ha moments you can share with a group of similarly minded friends, just as we have.