Completed the tenth short-short story today. The brevity, the intensity of saying something in one or two pages means that the basic situation has to be explained in about one paragraph. I think I'm managing to do that, although I don't really know yet. The stories have to sit for a few months, then I'll read them over.
I'm also attempting to suggest an entire world without actually describing it. That's Hemingway's old trick--or he tried for that in some of his stories, with mixed results. I think it works well in The Sun Also Rises, less well in some of his writing. It also works excellently in In Our Time and A Moveable Feast.
Hemingway is a problematic figure for many contemporary writers, because he seems to have been such a nasty person at times. I can't speak with any authority about that. All I can say is that he and Joyce (and/or Proust) serve as bookends for a particular era in fiction writing, where Joyce is the macro view and Hemingway is the micro. What I mean is that Hemingway is all about interiors and internal suffering, and Joyce is all about interactions between people. Joyce's universe is well-populated, whereas Hemingway's characters always live in the desert (in a psychological sense).
I love this era (modernism) for encompassing and comprehending two such disparate writers (not to mention Woolf, Stein, Beckett and so forth); the richness of that era for fiction is startling when one considers the paucity of excellence in our own period...but it's late and I need to continue this rant some other time.
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