Hemingway is only Human

It took more than seventy pages, but Hemingway's A Movable Feast finally comes back to the actual method of writing. Hearing about his time betting on horses and lunch with F. Scott Fitzgerald was interesting, but the point of this blog is to delve into the depths of writing. As Hemingway says, "Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I didn't not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph" (156). Alas, I can relate to the legendary wordsmith. If even one of the most renowned writers has trouble articulating his thoughts into words, then I can feel better about myself. Hemingway is now seen as human. I can relate and just picture him sitting in some cafe twiddling his thumbs and biting a pencil to shreds trying to think of what to say. I was generally doing the same thing before I found this quote. Don't worry though, my parents have properly chastised me about gnawing on the keyboard.
Does this mean that all writer's are this human? I see IB student's blood shot eyes and frazzled hair and think to myself are we really as great as Hemingway? We have to sit down every year and write a full length essay with proper thesis and structure that also applies all of the lessons we have learned in HOA and English. Old Ernesto can't even write a paragraph in one day sometimes! Could it really have changed from writer's taking the longest time to write paragraphs and now we write much more than that on a daily basis? Or is it simply that our papers aren't as good as Hemingway? Obviously, we may not all have the talents that he has. We also don't have to make novels, just essays. However, it is a testament to us that we can hammer out a paragraph in less than five minutes.
Hemingway also has a much harsher grading scale than we do. He probably has the largest pile of scrunched up papers filling all of the adjacent tables in his cafe because he has to write for himself. While we have harsh Swiss evaluators, nothing compares to the crushing disappointment in a paper if you are writing it for yourself and it doesn't live up to your standards. No one has low standards for themselves.
Every time I look over a paper I have written I see all the mistakes in neon highlighter, bright as can be. When we write for Swissies, we never actually write to our best standards. Those scrunched up papers most likely hold the ideas and paragraphs we would be glad to cut and paste into our own works. His own inner writer never tells him it is good enough.
So, while his paragraphs take longer to write, they are quality. IB is a harsh mistress, but it cannot compare to the shrew in each of us telling us to do better. It provides modest comfort that even Hemingway doesn't finish his assignments as quickly as he would like, but I still have to face the fact that I have to read his books with those day long paragraphs instead of the other way around.