Thank You

2014 has been a year filled with a lot of firsts for me; I took my first steps on European soil, I took my first swim in the Mediterranean and most recently I took my first breath under water, but more than all of these things I will remember 2014 as the year I started my first novel.

Writing a novel has been nowhere near the walk in the park I had first anticipated it to be. From outlining to character development to building plot; I jumped right into the deep-end and while flailing about, I tried to learn about all of them at once. Obviously this wasn’t the best way to learn, but learning is exactly what I did. I have a much better idea now of what it takes to write a novel. Of the preparation, planning and forethought that are needed before you can even begin to sit down and write. I also know that I am more than capable of doing it. I believe that I have a unique way with words and that I can create something wonderful with that ability.

What an adventure this summer was for me. I learned so much about writing and about myself. I found a lot of things this summer, but I lost some things as well. It wasn’t the walk in the park I thought it was going to be and this project didn’t give me all the answers I was looking for, but I am so glad that I did it. I am so happy and proud of myself for following this dream and for taking this giant leap.

I know it’s been quite a while since my last blog post and that is because I am putting the Hemingway Project on hiatus for the time being. I enjoyed plotting and building the characters for this novel and I will return to it soon, but right now there is some other writing projects that I want to focus my energies on. There won’t be a blog to go along with my next project, but please know that I am still writing everyday and hopefully in the coming months I will have some more written work to share with you. Please rest assured that I am not giving up on this novel. I plan to visit it again soon and I will finish it. I am just giving it some time to ferment while I work on some new projects.

As 2014 slowly comes to an end, I just wanted to take a moment to show my appreciation to all of you for following along in this adventure with me. Your support and encouragement have meant the world to me throughout this entire process and I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for all of it.

A Walk Through Hemingway’s Paris

Hemingway plays a major role in my novel. My protagonist is a struggling writer who turns to Ernest Hemingway for guidance. For the moment, this is all I can say about the plot of the novel. I hope it sheds some light on how important it was for me to spend some time in Hemingway’s Paris on my recent trip to Europe. I needed to absorb as much inspiration as possible and took this opportunity to see the city through his eyes. 



By creating my own walking tour, I was able to visit many of Hemingway’s favorite spots in Paris (both my step-counter and wallet can attest to this). My boyfriend Andrew and I strolled by the apartment buildings where he lived and walked through some of his favorite museums and gardens. We stopped to have a drink or a bite in some of his favorite cafes and brasseries. We also visited Shakespeare and Company, a book shop and one of my favorite stops on our journey. Each step we took and stop we made brought me just a little bit closer to the legend.



Shortly after returning home I was forwarded the following article: “Why Paris is forgetting Ernest Hemingway” by Hugh Schofield at the BBC News in Paris. You can read the article here: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28951095



The article itself is beautifully written and evokes many of the places we visited while in Paris. It highlights how the city is forgetting its memories of Ernest Hemingway. In all fairness, as Schofield points out, it is no easy charge to protect the memory of man long gone when there are so many younger voices to look to. The idea that Hemingway is “beginning to slip into the past” fills me with both excitement and dread. Through my novel I have an opportunity as a writer to bring a fading voice back into the limelight. This is something that I believe has been well accomplished in recent films like Hemingway and Gellhorn (2012), as well as in novels such as Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife. To live up to not only the man and his writing, but also the existing novels or films depicting him will be a challenge.

With all these thoughts and ideas flowing through my mind I leave the cafes of Paris behind to get back to work at my writing desk. I only have another six weeks of writing here at Purdy Lake before I have to head back to Montreal and reality so I had better make the most of it.

Researching Abroad

One of the most difficult aspects of writing is making your words and descriptions read with an air of reality around them. It is difficult to write about an experience or a place when you yourself have never had that experience or been to that place.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research into the various topics and figures in my novel, but sometimes a lifetime of research can’t help you describe something as vividly as if you had experienced it yourself. Without giving too much away, I can tell you that my main character is female and is around my age. I find myself easily relating to her current frame of mind and experiences. At the same time, I have been gifting her with some of my own experiences. For this reason I have been finding it quite easy to write about her emotional state, but I have been struggling with the physical world surrounding her.

My protagonist (for those of you who don’t know a protagonist is the main character) is traveling throughout the majority of the novel and I am having trouble vividly depicting the places and culture that surrounds her. As great as I may think my dialogue or internal conflicts are, when I can’t get the atmosphere right it diminishes the integrity of the scenes as a whole.

Luckily for me, I have a golden opportunity on the horizon – a research trip (well partially). On August 1st I will be leaving on a month long trip to Europe. The first two weeks will be spent with my mom, sister, aunt and two cousins traveling in London and than throughout Ireland. When they leave for home two weeks later I will be hoping on a plane to Spain and Paris where I will be joined by my boyfriend for the remainder of my time abroad.

My protagonist will be traveling through most of these places as well so I will be spending much of my month taking in the atmosphere of the cities around me; walking the streets of Paris, feeling the sun on my face in Barcelona, drinking a pint in Galway. When I return to my little office here in early September I hope to have a vast arsenal of descriptions and additional experiences to truly bring the world of my novel to life.

I am traveling light so I won’t be bringing my laptop to update my blog while I’m away. For those of you who wish to keep up with my progress, I will try to post little notes and images to my Instagram account. Simply follow sargentbrandy.

Thanks for taking an interest and wish me luck. See you in a month.

The Writing Process

Now that I’ve built some amazing characters and laid down a timeline for each act of my novel, I have a pretty good basis to get back to writing. As Ernest Hemingway plays a significant role in my novel (more on this in a later blog post), his was really the only writing process to use for this project.

Hemingway was very serious about his writing, but he was also very serious about his other hobbies: fishing, boating, hunting, etc. His writing process allowed for him to have the best of both of these worlds. Papa would write from 7:00 am to noon. This gave him his mornings for work and his afternoons off to enjoy his other interests. He could often be found out on his boat Pilar in the afternoons, enjoying some fishing in the Keys or off the coast of Cuba. If he was really on a roll with something, he might have extended his writing time, but it was rare for Papa to be found at work on those projects in the late afternoons.

With this process in mind, I get up each morning and write until noon. I wish I was more of morning person, because 7:00 am is proving to be a bit of a struggle for me. For now I can usually be found at my desk by 8:30 am. In the afternoon’s you won’t find me out trolling for fish, but I do try to change my perspective and head space before getting back to it the next day. I work around the cottage with my Dad gardening, painting decks or whatever other task needs to be addressed. Before going to sleep I often take down some notes on the thoughts and ideas that popped into my head during day, and this usually gives me a starting point for where I want to begin in the morning.

For now, the Hemingway Process seems to be working for me, but that doesn’t mean I might not switch it up in the future. I wish I had something a little more exciting to share with you on the process, but for now its just a lot of me sitting and typing and a little bit of me talking to myself. This writer’s life is not a glamorous one, at least not yet…

Outlines, Timelines & Changing Minds

I had this beautiful idea that I wouldn’t write a complete outline for my novel, choosing to let the story grow naturally as I typed away on my laptop. I had a general plot and I knew the sequence of events well enough, but I wasn’t going to outline everything scene by scene. You shouldn’t be surprised to hear that this naive amateur was quite obviously mistaken in thinking that would work.

My first week of writing went really well, but I noticed that my scenes were all over the place. Although I was writing at a good pace, it would be months before I could put something together that traveled along a linear story arc with the jumble of scenes I had written.

Realizing I wasn’t going to be able to go with the flow as I had imagined, I turned to the internet and my solid collection of books on writing for ways to add a little structure to my writing project.

As you saw last week, before even considering your plot outline you need to have a strong set of characters. So I spent a week building people and creating personalities for them. Now it was time to get down to the hard stuff: outlining.

Over the past week I have been writing a synopsis for my novel and building a timeline of three acts. The synopsis is of the utmost importance because it is often what publishers will read before they even consider looking at your novel. If the synopsis does not show a strong writing ability and a solid story arc then publishers won’t even consider opening your manuscript. In order to write a solid synopsis I have to make sure that the three acts of my novel are strong.

The first act needs to outline the significant event of the novel. It needs to address the motivations of characters and build a background for their actions. The first act needs to develop characters that are strong enough to keep the reader interested throughout the next two acts. The first act is crucial as it needs to engage the reader enough to keep them reading.

The second act complicates and deepens the drama. It still addresses the motivations and desires of the characters, but in Act II they might begin to change based on unfolding events. The end of the second act is where you often find the climax of the novel, the point in which the protagonist learns something significant about himself.

The third act is the wrapping paper; time to tie everything together and throw a bow on top. By the third act all major plot points need to have been addressed and resolved. The characters have changed or learned something from their actions in the novel. The final scene itself needs to be strong enough to linger in the readers mind after they have closed the book and put it away.

Needless to say my outline is starting to look an awful lot like a Shakespearean play, Act I, Scene I – In fair Montreal, where we lay our scene, a star-crossed writer changes her mind…again.

I thought character development was going to be hard, but outlining is quite the daunting task, especially when I keep changing my mind every couple hours. Scenes that I thought I would place at the beginning of my novel are quickly finding their way to the middle and the middle is seeping into the end, but I feel confident that I have a solid collection of scenes to work with. Hopefully by next week (maybe the week after) I will be back to daily writing, tackling one scene at a time. In the meantime, if you’ll excuse me – I’ve got plotting to do.

Bringing Characters to Life

I’ve spent the past few days in character development; inventing people, designing their personas, writing their histories, giving them names. I’ve done everything from picking my characters birthdays, to deciding their likes and dislikes, all the way to describing their favorite childhood memories – all so that going forward I will be able to bring these characters to life on the page.

To build a character is not easy. To ensure they are believable you need to make them live off the page, as though they were a real person and not just a fabricated persona. Their life stories can’t just begin and end where you set your novel. For the past few days, I’ve had to look backward into the personal histories of these characters to explain the people they are by the time they arrive in the pages of my novel.

Where characters are concerned Hemingway believes:

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel.”

With that in mind, I have started to think of these characters as real people. All their memories and voices have been building in my head, intersecting with each other. I am continuously jumping from one profile to the next as I think of some mannerism or childhood memory for these people I have created. To really bring them to life, I have been giving them some of my own memories and experiences. Another tidbit I picked up from Papa Hemingway:

“People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him.”

I have also been borrowing fragments and traits from the people in my life to to pull them straight off the page and into the real world. The hardest part has been to spread these fragments around so that no one person from my real life is identifiable with one of these fictional creations. One of my writing teachers once told me that being a writer is difficult because people are always finding themselves in your work, and are not always happy with the way in which they have been portrayed. You need to be willing to stand by your work and lose a few friends along the way. I would like to think that my friends and family will get over it, but with that thought in mind, I have been careful not to overly associate one of the characters in my novel with someone from my life. Again, I think Hemingway said it best:

“Most of the people in this story are alive and I was writing it very carefully to not have anybody identifiable.”

Once I feel strongly about these characters, I will begin really laying down the outline of how my novel will progress (more on that next week!). In the meantime, I need to finalize a few more character profiles. Thank you for letting me borrow your quirks and personality traits, hopefully you enjoy finding them in the finished product. If not, it was nice knowing you 😉

Welcome to The Hemingway Project

Two weeks ago I did something most people would find insane, something I am still finding a little insane – I left my job to write a novel.

Although I majored in English Literature in University and have since taken a handful of classes in creative writing, I have never attempted to write something as lengthy as a novel. However, I know that this is something I have always wanted to do.

I love to write, but I have never had the self-discipline to really sit down to it everyday. Over the past few years it seems there has always been something more important for me to do. What started as having to finish a reading for class or writing the works cited page on an essay, quickly turned into my being too tired after my nine-to-five desk job, wanting to go out to meet up with friends, or binge watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix. I started to realize that if I was ever going to get real about writing then I needed to do it now, at 25, while I was without any major debt, a mortgage to pay or a family to feed. If I was ever really going to follow my dream, what better time than now?

The first thing I needed to do was to share my plan. Once others knew it would be pretty impossible for me to quit. So I started telling my family and friends that I wanted to take some time off from work to write a novel. I told my parents, my sisters, my boyfriend, his parents, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, my friends, their friends. I pretty much told everyone I met.

I had expected apprehension from my friends and family, but instead I received nothing but support and positive encouragement. As time went on, they even started telling people about my upcoming adventure for me, cementing me on this new path. Now I had an amazing support system in place to push me forward.

The second thing I realized was that I wasn’t going to be able to write this novel just anywhere. It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that I realized this in the middle of a Netflix bender. I think this time it was during season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So what would be the perfect place to write, without the distraction of the internet (Netflix and  Pinterest to be specific) and the general distractions of city life? Cottage Country! Which as it just so happens is exactly where my parents live, with a second little cottage on their property the perfect size for me. So I decided to move back in with Mom and Dad for a few months while I really pushed myself to write this novel.

Things were starting to fall into place. I had the support of my friends and family, I had somewhere to go and I had a general idea of what I wanted to write about. All I had to do now was give my notice at work, pack what I needed to bring with me and I’d be on my way. Sounds like that would have been the easy part, but each step had its own little difficulties.

Everything finally came together about two weeks ago. I am officially moved in with Mom and Dad for the summer and I have started writing. I’m still no where near a 100% sure of what I’m doing, but I’m writing a little bit everyday. There is definitely going to be a learning curve and who knows how it’s all going to turn out, but I’m here and I’m following a dream.

As I have shared this project with so many people over the past several months, I decided to put this little blog together so that I could easily share updates on my writing endeavor and the learning’s or information I pick up along the way. Welcome to The Hemingway Project.

(I hit 10,000 words yesterday!)