The Green Knight's Quest

There’s not much to report on the mapping front. I’ll be pressing on with creating trees. Yesterday while catching Pokemon I noticed that some of the trees on the green would work as assets. While, in an ideal world, I’d create my assets entirely from photos taken on fieldwork, this is not practical. Most of Penrhos is densely wooded, which makes it impossible to get a good picture of ‘a tree’ - you’re usually very close, can’t get the entire tree into the frame, and the tree is halfway obscured by other trees. Which is the opposite to what you need in assets, where you want a clear, iconic shape that is easily recognisable as a member of the species. So while my bluebells and daffodils and wild garlic were photographed in Penrhos, my trees, other than the Elder Stateselm, were not. (I’m also cheating with the spotted laurel. At the time, I didn’t have photos from location, and honestly, only I will know.)

So let’s turn our attention to next month, November, which has been ‘National Novel Writing Month’ for nearly 25 years, until the organisation took zero steps to prevent pedophiles from grooming children and has been scrambling and making bad decisions and blaming its members ever since.

It says something that I have a 'NaNo Meltdown 2024' on my hard drive which I have had since March.


The last remaining ML in London has just stepped down, despite doing her best to keep the lights on so new people would have a place to land, but the stepping back is largely performative as it appears there are no MLs for NaNo yet – they were trying to force a (probably illegal everywhere) agreement on new MLs after firing all of them, but so far onboarding hasn’t happened.

I’m also not getting any communications from NaNo; the last one was way back. I’m not even getting the usual begging emails.

But anyway, I won’t rename my #30DaysOfNano hashtag, and shall probably refer to it as ‘NaNoWriMo’ in the future, because it’s been an institution for so long. (I didn’t join right away, but fairly early on. There weren’t any meetups in Wales while I was living there, but I went to the Oxford ones, and later London, and later the London discord.)


Anyway. This November, I don't think I shall chace wordcount, I certainly won't begin a new project, but I want to pick up one of my existing ones and push forward. I also want to hone my skills, and have found inspiration in an unlikely place: Writing like Hemingway.

Or rather, learning to write from Hemingway.

So let's look at the man, his writing, and his writing advice a bit more.



But first, the Hemingway Editor website.



Yeah.

Does the red sentence go into the weeds a bit? Yes, but it's the kind of casual slightly rambly style that I was going for.
The thing also doesn't know that there are three diifferent 'just's, and I used both the modifier (could have said 'merely meandering') and the temporal (back pain set in five minutes earlier).
But yes, I think this is a reasonable impression of what people THINK 'writing like Hemingway' means, though we may quibble about individual choices. (I was quite proud of the 'gripey, complainy, whiny wordage' and don't tell me that there are '0 words with simpler alternatives'. IS 'wordage' even a word?

Anyway. What do writers think 'writing like Hemingway' looks like?
There are at least two books on the topic and probably dozens of articles.

Most frequently I have found the stylistic advice taken from Hemingway’s days as a reporter
Use short sentences, use a short first paragraph, use adjectives and adverbs sparingly, use positive words (the day is sunny, not rain-free. Probably not the best example, but it’s my own.)
There’s a few more of those, but all of them, to me, sound like journalistic advice that he felt served him well – writing with clarity for readers with a short attention span – other than one I’ve seen variously as ‘vigorous English’ and ‘active verbs’. Ad far as I can see, these refer to ‘strong verbs’ which goes with the ‘don’t needlessly use adjectives’. _Avoid them_.

Along with that comes ‘using short words’ which, in English, more often than not, means Anglo-Saxon rather than French or Latin roots; and I feel this is an important thing to keep in mind. this is a good example of the 'Hemingway wrote like this' genre.

(I'll come back to this.)


Looking at this post, I think it's long enough. This is Hemingway through a looking glass briefly, the short, almost abrupt, sparse, cut-it-to-the-bone Hemingway of legend. ]

Maybe this section should be called 'edit like Hemingway' because so far, the items I've picked are all about word choices and how to string them buggers together.

I thought I could pick a short piece (200 words) of my writing and simplify it according to Hemingway rules ^H guidelines, and I am satisfied to find that this is really hard, which means that I did not use my words in vain.

_If he chooses to bring the guild into disrepute_ – what is one supposed to do with that? 'Give the guild a bad name' doesn't quite have the same flavour. 'Ruins the good name of our guild' comes closer. 'Drag the good name of our guild into the mud'?



“You do not like him.”
Sometimes I wish I could hide my thoughts better. “Like him or not, I have to protect him. If he chooses to drag the good name of our Ishtar into the mud, I must condemn that and protect the rest of the mages of the Five Kingdoms. I will not put others in danger for his sake.”
“I want to be in that room.”
“No problem. It might be better if you dress as a guard,” I added. “If he thinks you are the man to butter up, he will ignore me, and I would like him to leave you alone.”
Tofrunir laughed. “You really do not like him, do you? I will arrange it.” He reached for a form in his desk that had been printed already and filled out the request. He summoned a runner and the fun began.



“You do not like him.”
Sometimes I wish I was more of a man of mystery. “Like him or not, I have a duty to protect him. If he chooses to bring the Ishtar into disrepute, I have a duty to condemn that and protect the rest of the mages of the Five Kingdoms. I will not endanger others for his sake.”
“I want to be in that room.”
“No problem. It might be better if you don the cloak of a guard,” I added. “If he thinks you are the man to butter up, he will ignore me, and I would like him to leave you alone.”
Tofrunir laughed, a deep, booming laugh that would have done Harulik proud. “You really do not like him, do you? I will arrange it.” He reached for a form in his desk – a form pre-printed and pre-numbered, as I noticed – and filled out the request. A runner was summoned quickly and the grand machine was set in motion.


And while this has been a rough draft – I have not yet edited this book, though I will occasionally read through it and fix things that jump out to me – a lot of the choices I made are stylistic choices. You can argue whether they work or not, and I will be going over them again later, but now that I am forcing myself to undo them in favour of an arbitrary set of rules, their absence rubs me the wrong way.

This is text from Valendon's own diary, which means that sometimes the register jumps sharply, he'll often mix present and past tenses, and there are a lot of snarky asides. Pulling out from reporting direct speech to the somewhat bored 'a runner was summoned' was also deliberate; this is more about how things are handled habitually than specific actions, and it's the last line of this particular entry, so pulling away feels right here.

There's more Hemingway, and more trees (though I took a break and drew a red squirrel), but those are stories to be told another day.

I could probably simplify the passage even further, but those edits are hard work, and I like them not.