A guest speaker shared her life story and journey of how she became a writer, along with some helpful hints on writing with middle school students at St. Andrew Catholic School Monday morning.
Hilary Hemingway, the niece of Ernst Hemingway, spent almost an hour and a half with 6th, 7th and 8th grade students as she answered many questions that the students had.
Bambi Giles, English teacher at the school, said she invited Hemingway to speak to her students because she is trying to teach them about plagiarism. She said she needed her students to hear from an accomplished writer that you cannot take credit for something that is not yours.
Hemingway explained to the students that she needed permission to use her uncle’s writing from “The Old Man and the Sea” before she could put it into her screenplay that she was writing “Hemingway and Fuentes.” She said if she did not ask for permission it would be considered plagiarism, even if Ernst Hemingway was a member of her family.
For her screenplay, she had to pay $10,000 for 1,000 words that she would be utilizing in “The Old Man in the Sea.” She ended up only using 870 words from the novel.
Giles said she also wanted her students to understand that even though they may have dyslexia they can become a successful writer.
“It is the bookends I’m trying to reach,” she said.
Hemingway shared with the students that she has dyslexia, which she believes gives her an edge to her writing because of the way she interprets and thinks about things.
She also shared a few helpful hints with the students on how to begin their writing career. She encouraged them to write as much as they could in the style that they preferred.
“Write whatever you’re most comfortable with … do whatever your passion is because it’s not a job, it’s something you want to do,” Hemingway said, adding that the students should also write about a believable, interesting character to capture their audience.
Hemingway received a degree in film writing from the University of Miami and has worked in the journalism industry for the past 25 years. Although she always heard stories about her uncle, he died when she was two months old.
Her husband, Jeffrey Freundlich, who uses the pen name Jeffrey Lindsay, will visit with the middle school students at St. Andrew Catholic School today to talk about his writing career.