Flash Fiction / Pittsburgh / Blogging

By far my favorite writer is Hemingway and my favorite novel is The Sun Also Rises. So far I must have read the book over thirty times. There was one summer when I was a young man and I was trying to find my voice as a writer that I read The Sun Also Rises at least six times. I would read it and put it away and then become lonely for the characters and read the book again.

I was amazed that an entire novel could be written in that athletic, stripped-down, concrete language Heminway used. I have never come across another novel that used such a whirlwind of down to earth surface action "to map the inner, emotional landscape" of its wonderfully individualized characters. These were real people. Not because the author told you they were real but because he showed you they were real. The characters, even the animals and the environment, acted out the themes of the novel. There's very little exposition in the book; hardly anything is explained. It was all so real. It was all so life like.

So, when it came time for me to write Compressionism: The Pittsburgh Stories, I put a 16,000 word novella smack dab in the middle of all those 500 to 1,200 word flash fiction stories. And I wrote the entire novella under the influence of my love for The Sun Also Rises. In The Garden Of Love is my tribute to Hemingway's mandra of "show don't tell." I only hope that I was true to my mentor's teachings.