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Recent Fascinations | The Fiction Books that Made Me #6: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA
Want to understand what this series is? Go Here
“My big fish must be somewhere.”
Talking about this particular story is a bit different than the others we’ve tackled so far in this series. While all of the books in these essays so far have been speculative fiction of one kind or the other, this one is one of the most notorious works of literary fiction in history. Mention Hemingway’s THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA to most people who attended public school in the United States and you’ll get a maligned groan followed by some version of “that stupid fish book.”
However, every once in a while, you’ll get a different sort of reaction. In every class of high school kids forced to read Hemingway, there are always a couple who fall in love with this story of an old man fighting with a fish on the open sea. I was one of those kids. Something in Hemingway’s prose struck me the first time I read it. From this book, I went further. First to FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, which will come up again in this series, and then eventually to his short stories. Hemingway’s ability to tell such a powerful, meaningful story in so few words mesmerized me and instilled in me a lifelong appreciation of literary fiction. It is an affection that, as we progress on through this series, you will see maintains even to today.
This series, though, isn’t meant to just explore my favorite books, but instead the way that they influenced me as a writer. THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA served as a pivotal moment for my writing as a young kid. When I first read the book as a Junior in high school, I immediately latched onto…all of the wrong things. I had already begun working on my own long form projects, and at once I started attempting to implement what I saw as Hemingway’s style into my work. This, of course, led to horrible results. As many young, naive writers have done, I took all of the wrong lessons from Hemingway’s prose and none of the right ones.
I cut my sentences down. I removed any exposition, any flare from my writing. I pulled the dialogue into tight, terse exchanges. In turn, I cut all of the character from my writing. I didn’t take the true strengths of Hemingway’s legendary (or infamous, depending on who you ask) iceberg style. I didn’t layer my dialogue with subtext and tension. I didn’t pull the scenery into the foreground and allow my prose to speak for itself. Instead, I hacked away at my writing like a butcher with a cleaver on a bad day.
More than anything, what my love for Hemingway has taught me in the long span of my time as a writer is the importance of subtext. While as a younger writer I peeled away at my writing while not filling in the layers beneath the text, now I try, as much as my journeyman hands can manage, to fill those gaps. I think that my previous failures have guided me in this path more than anything. With writing, much like many things, we have to fail before we can understand how to succeed.
Of course, I don’t mean to imply I have attained anything like a Hemingway styled prose. I have largely abandoned that pursuit, instead settling into something more comfortable to my own hand. Our styles as writers are built off of our favorites, our inspirations, and that includes those that may not fit our own hand as well as others. While I no longer try to cut my prose to that legendary athletic style, I do still try to find places to leave pauses, to let the text breathe. To let the subtext carry its weight.
Though, like any craft, this is a labor that never ends. Perhaps, though, I will find my big fish one day.
Thanks for reading.
