The Tesseract of Life Connects the Great with the merely mortal

Susan Wingate is an esteemed author of “Christian Fantasy” and other fiction derivatives. I met her briefly when she was speaking at the 2014 Whidbey Island Writers Conference. She impressed me there as someone who has deep understanding of the writers craft and a good practical sense. She told me that she learned early on in her career that you don’t drink carbonated drinks right before going on stage.

More recently, I came across an article on her website discussing opening lines of a story.
I left a comment asking how her approach squared with some of the simpler examples provided in a dated article in the American Book Review listing the top 100 opening lines. My naive inquiry drew an extensive and well thought out response, just like you might expect from a person who writes for a living. Doesn’t she know that she doesn’t have to humor someone who hasn’t taken a writing class since college?

Anyway, her next blog post wrapped up with the link to the American Book Review article and a shout-out to me.  (It is only fair then that I highlight my source for this information here.  Thank you Google! ;^) 

She also pointed to a longish interview with Ernest Hemingway in the Paris Review.
This is a frank and illustrious tete a tete with a very knowledgeable interviewer, who worked hard to get Mr. Hemingway to open up about his writing practice and philosophy.  I think if I were to becomes a writer for profit, I would want to study this carefully.

I have a mixed emotions about Ernest Hemingway as an author.  Like anyone who is at the top of their game for any length of time, he has earned a lot of respect.  I enjoyed, but did not understand his “A Moveable Feast” and I enjoyed “Old Man and the Sea” for its universal truth about some peoples sanity, how/why they got that way, and how the world puts up with them.

I once read a short story by Hemingway that is placed on a small island in the Caribbean.  I don’t remember the title but the whole story was told from the deck of a couple of sports fishing boats tied to the dock. The characters are in various stages of drunkenness and are pretty much insensitive to the local inhabitants. Fireworks are being shot off from the boat towards the land, catching thatch roofs on fire for entertainment.  Then an argument breaks out between two boat owners, one drunker than the other and thus at a physical disadvantage.  The other, uses this to disable his opponents ability to swing his arms or even protect his face from being beaten to a pulp.  It is a story of brazen cruelty without any apology.   I can’t forgive Ernest Hemingway for describing this scene as a form of entertainment.

I don’t think he would care or even realize that some people value life more than his narcissistic soul if he were alive today.  He may be a great writer, but he is a waste of a human being.

So, thank you Susan Wingate for bringing back my feelings about Ernest Hemingway and teaching me a bit about opening lines in novels as well.