“The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.” — Ernest Hemingway
I took a break from writing, not because I was tired, but because I had nothing worth saying. I needed a year to see, to hear, to learn and understand again.
My life has moved in hobbies, one folding into the next. Music, history, filmmaking, photography, shotgun shooting, and traveling, but writing is the one that always finds its way back when there’s something I understand well enough to express, after all a writer should master the subject.
I started as a reporter for my middle school newspaper, the Bulldog Review, in the small village of Elida, Ohio. Not long after, I discovered girls, then poetry became my language.
I invented my own structure: an upside-down limerick. Instead of AABBA, I wrote ABBAA. It felt deeper to me, less playful, more passionate, which is important in expressing love.
In high school at Coe-Brown Academy in Northwood, New Hampshire, a gifted English teacher pushed me further. I studied photography, too, but writing was the thing that held on. I became so good at romantic poems that I also became a father at barely 18. Career quickly replaced hobby. Supporting a young family became the most important work of all.
In college, I returned to English and creative writing. My confidence grew. Later, I found an opportunity with Dave Rogers, editor of The Daily News of Newburyport, to write a column.
That allowed me to use what I’ve always had, storytelling. Since I was a boy, my grandmother and aunts would sit me on the kitchen table and let me tell stories, laughing and listening as if what I had to say mattered. They filled me with the belief that my words were important. In a way, that was my first lesson in how to make people fall in love with what I had to say.
This past year, I stepped away again. I focused on building what I hope becomes the finest auto auction in New England because passion is powerful, but bills are real. Still, I read. I searched for discipline.
I read “On Writing” by Stephen King, part memoir, part master class. King writes every day, holidays included, aiming for about 2,000 words each morning. He finishes drafts in months, not years. He reads 70 to 80 books a year. His message is simple: if you want to be a great writer, you must be a relentless reader.
After that, I dove into his epic, “The Stand,” 78 chapters, sprawling and immense. What I learned from those pages is that each character carries a piece of him. They feel real because they come from truth. That may be his real secret.
I also read “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir” by A. E. Hotchner, which led me to Hemingway’s first novel, “The Sun Also Rises.”
Like King, Hemingway wrote daily. Both men valued discipline. Both respected restraint. Hemingway, who began as a journalist, understood the weight of each word. In his work, you feel that nothing is accidental. Every sentence feels earned. Every word has been measured.
I think many of us carry our relationship with our vocation the way Ernest Hemingway carried his as both journalist and novelist. If we’re fortunate, we fall into work we love. And if we’re even more fortunate, that work loves us back.
But love stories, even the good ones, are complicated. Stress creeps in. Technology reshapes the landscape. Growth brings pressure. What once felt effortless begins to feel heavy. It isn’t that we fall out of love; it’s that outside forces disrupt the rhythm. The joy gets buried under expectation, performance, and profit.
I sometimes wonder what undid Hemingway. Was it the loss of language? Did he fear he had run out of things worth saying? Did the silence close in on him? and does Stephen King ever fear the same fate? Is that why he writes with such relentless discipline day after day, year after year as if consistency itself might keep the well from running dry?
In our own careers, don’t we all wrestle with that quiet fear? Maybe the spark that once brought success could fade? Is relevance fragile?
Hemingway’s life was a procession of passions hunting, fishing, photography, travel, along with a complicated string of loves and marriages. But his true occupation was the distillation of those experiences. He absorbed his hobbies, his triumphs and failures, and turned them into story. Victories became narrative. Defeats became meaning.
Perhaps that is the real work not simply doing what we love, but learning how to translate it before the words slip away.
It’s been an interesting year for me, one filled with movement and discovery. I hope to tell a few stories about the roads I’ve traveled and the things I’ve stumbled upon along the way. In the months ahead, I plan to write about Pablo Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, history, photography, owls, family, museums, music, travel and love.
I hope you’ll read along. I’m full and ready to digest.
C.J. Fizwater lives in Salisbury.