Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

ErnestHemingway

Image by Lloyd Arnold via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fish­er­man, Ernest Hem­ing­way was a crafts­man who would rise very ear­ly in the morn­ing and write. His best sto­ries are mas­ter­pieces of the mod­ern era, and his prose style is one of the most influ­en­tial of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

Hem­ing­way nev­er wrote a trea­tise on the art of writ­ing fic­tion.  He did, how­ev­er, leave behind a great many pas­sages in let­ters, arti­cles and books with opin­ions and advice on writ­ing. Some of the best of those were assem­bled in 1984 by Lar­ry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hem­ing­way on Writ­ing. We’ve select­ed sev­en of our favorite quo­ta­tions from the book and placed them, along with our own com­men­tary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and read­ers alike–find them fas­ci­nat­ing.

1: To get start­ed, write one true sen­tence.

Hem­ing­way had a sim­ple trick for over­com­ing writer’s block. In a mem­o­rable pas­sage in A Move­able Feast, he writes:

Some­times when I was start­ing a new sto­ry and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the lit­tle oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sput­ter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not wor­ry. You have always writ­ten before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sen­tence. Write the truest sen­tence that you know.” So final­ly I would write one true sen­tence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sen­tence that I knew or had seen or had heard some­one say. If I start­ed to write elab­o­rate­ly, or like some­one intro­duc­ing or pre­sent­ing some­thing, I found that I could cut that scroll­work or orna­ment out and throw it away and start with the first true sim­ple declar­a­tive sen­tence I had writ­ten.

2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will hap­pen next.

There is a dif­fer­ence between stop­ping and founder­ing. To make steady progress, hav­ing a dai­ly word-count quo­ta was far less impor­tant to Hem­ing­way than mak­ing sure he nev­er emp­tied the well of his imag­i­na­tion. In an Octo­ber 1935 arti­cle in Esquire “Mono­logue to the Mae­stro: A High Seas Let­ter”) Hem­ing­way offers this advice to a young writer:

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will hap­pen next. If you do that every day when you are writ­ing a nov­el you will nev­er be stuck. That is the most valu­able thing I can tell you so try to remem­ber it.

3: Nev­er think about the sto­ry when you’re not work­ing.

Build­ing on his pre­vi­ous advice, Hem­ing­way says nev­er to think about a sto­ry you are work­ing on before you begin again the next day. “That way your sub­con­scious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it con­scious­ly or wor­ry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Move­able Feast:

When I was writ­ing, it was nec­es­sary for me to read after I had writ­ten. If you kept think­ing about it, you would lose the thing you were writ­ing before you could go on with it the next day. It was nec­es­sary to get exer­cise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was bet­ter than any­thing. But after­wards, when you were emp­ty, it was nec­es­sary to read in order not to think or wor­ry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already nev­er to emp­ty the well of my writ­ing, but always to stop when there was still some­thing there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

4: When it’s time to work again, always start by read­ing what you’ve writ­ten so far.

T0 main­tain con­ti­nu­ity, Hem­ing­way made a habit of read­ing over what he had already writ­ten before going fur­ther. In the 1935 Esquire arti­cle, he writes:

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, cor­rect­ing as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chap­ters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.

5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.

Close obser­va­tion of life is crit­i­cal to good writ­ing, said Hem­ing­way. The key is to not only watch and lis­ten close­ly to exter­nal events, but to also notice any emo­tion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and iden­ti­fy pre­cise­ly what it was that caused the emo­tion. If you can iden­ti­fy the con­crete action or sen­sa­tion that caused the emo­tion and present it accu­rate­ly and ful­ly round­ed in your sto­ry, your read­ers should feel the same emo­tion. In Death in the After­noon, Hem­ing­way writes about his ear­ly strug­gle to mas­ter this:

I was try­ing to write then and I found the great­est dif­fi­cul­ty, aside from know­ing tru­ly what you real­ly felt, rather than what you were sup­posed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what real­ly hap­pened in action; what the actu­al things were which pro­duced the emo­tion that you expe­ri­enced. In writ­ing for a news­pa­per you told what hap­pened and, with one trick and anoth­er, you com­mu­ni­cat­ed the emo­tion aid­ed by the ele­ment of time­li­ness which gives a cer­tain emo­tion to any account of some­thing that has hap­pened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emo­tion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stat­ed it pure­ly enough, always, was beyond me and I was work­ing very hard to get it.

6: Use a pen­cil.

Hem­ing­way often used a type­writer when com­pos­ing let­ters or mag­a­zine pieces, but for seri­ous work he pre­ferred a pen­cil. In the Esquire arti­cle (which shows signs of hav­ing been writ­ten on a type­writer) Hem­ing­way says:

When you start to write you get all the kick and the read­er gets none. So you might as well use a type­writer because it is that much eas­i­er and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to con­vey every­thing, every sen­sa­tion, sight, feel­ing, place and emo­tion to the read­er. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pen­cil you get three dif­fer­ent sights at it to see if the read­er is get­ting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get anoth­er chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writ­ing it first in pen­cil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good aver­age for a hit­ter. It also keeps it flu­id longer so you can bet­ter it eas­i­er.

7: Be Brief.

Hem­ing­way was con­temp­tu­ous of writ­ers who, as he put it, “nev­er learned how to say no to a type­writer.” In a 1945 let­ter to his edi­tor, Maxwell Perkins, Hem­ing­way writes:

It was­n’t by acci­dent that the Get­tys­burg address was so short. The laws of prose writ­ing are as immutable as those of flight, of math­e­mat­ics, of physics.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

The Big Ernest Hem­ing­way Pho­to Gallery: The Nov­el­ist in Cuba, Spain, Africa and Beyond

The Span­ish Earth, Writ­ten and Nar­rat­ed by Ernest Hem­ing­way

Archive of Hemingway’s News­pa­per Report­ing Reveals Nov­el­ist in the Mak­ing

Find Cours­es on Hem­ing­way and Oth­er Authors in our big list of Free Online Cours­es


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Comments (70)
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  • For me, the most impor­tant advice is to not think about the sto­ry when one is not work­ing on it. In the mean­while the sub­con­scious is doing the job for you. This sim­ply works.

  • TNNA says:

    It’s a good list, but you neglect­ed to men­tion my favorite Hem­ing­way writ­ing tip: http://talentneednotapply.com/?p=573

  • N. K. Bellani says:

    Be your own spon­ta­neous self and write, when you like and the way like, is my tip…

  • More tips. says:

    Tip #8 — Be drunk.

    Tip #9 — Com­mit sui­cide once you’ve achieved fame and for­tune.

  • Melayahm says:

    #2 is so damn obvi­ous, it’s genius, and yet I’ve nev­er seen it before on any oth­er site about writ­ing! (and I’ve Stum­bledupon a lot of writ­ing sites)

  • Thank you for shar­ing these writ­ing tips. It always amazes me how one suc­cess­ful writer insists we must do one thing, then anoth­er believes we must do the oppo­site. I am not what I would call a suc­cess­ful writer yet, but it is pret­ty clear to me that the great­est obsta­cle to cre­at­ing clear, under­stand­able work, whether it be fic­tion or non-fic­tion, is actu­al­ly show­ing up and writ­ing. It is quite a lot eas­i­er to edit some­thing that is writ­ten than it is to alter some­thing that exists only in my mind. I do not remem­ber the writer who said, “What sep­a­rates a writer from a would-be writer is that the writer writes,” but I have read so many writ­ers of dif­fer­ent skill lev­els I would have to agree.

    Any­way I real­ly appre­ci­ate this arti­cle and the time you put into shar­ing it with us. I will be locat­ing the book cit­ed and learn­ing more from Mr. Hem­ing­way because of your efforts.

    Thank you!

  • Elissa Field says:

    Thanks for curat­ing this clas­sic list. It’s some­times easy to dis­miss the icon­ic writ­ers, but Hem­ing­way was a pio­neer in his time — and pre­dat­ed the abun­dance of writ­ing advice and MFA pro­grams we live in now.

    I shared a link to your arti­cle in my Fri­day Links for Writ­ers 02.22.13: http://elissafield.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/friday-links-for-writers-02–22-13/

  • It’s some­times easy to icon­ic writ­ers.

  • Kari says:

    I did find them fas­ci­nat­ing. Num­ber two real­ly res­onat­ed with me as some­thing I need to start doing today. Usu­al­ly, I exhaust my imag­i­na­tion and then allow it to refu­el for the night, but I can see how stop­ping before it becomes exhaust­ed will help me to nev­er be stuck the next day.

  • Karen Cioffi says:

    Great infor­ma­tion. I nev­er heard of #2 and #3 — inter­est­ing. I’ve shared this also.

  • Ravi Ahuja says:

    Thanks for shar­ing, these tips will not just help to write fic­tion but can also help for writ­ing blog post, books or on top­ic which you less aware.

  • Susan Waterwyk says:

    Out­stand­ing Arti­cle!!! Sound advice. It made me feel as if “Papa” had sent me a per­son­al let­ter. Thank you! Sev­en Times Thank you!

  • Bustami says:

    excel­lent stuff.. i real­ly love to write and still learn­ing how to do it in fine way.. thanks

  • Akasha says:

    This is such a great resource, Thanks for shar­ing!

  • These are very good point­ers from a mas­ter writer. Thank you.

  • Excel­lent arti­cle and so help­ful to me right now. I have worked with the sub­con­scious for some time now in oth­er areas and to hear a writer lis­ten to his in this intu­itive way fills me with so much joy. Thank you for your hard work, great­ly appre­ci­at­ed.

  • Angela Grant says:

    Thanks for the tips. I find writ­ing dif­fi­cult and will pro­cras­ti­nate. Nev­er did I think of just writ­ing a sen­tence that is true. If I am to be dis­ci­plined I bet­ter start writ­ing. :)

  • Treat writ­ing like work. We don’t get “doing the dish­es block.”

  • Mitch says:

    I don’t write, I bleed.

  • Mariamni Heracleous says:

    Like Hem­ing­way… no one else! (I believe) Thanks for the tips.

  • Larry W. Phillips says:

    I would add to this:
    Some days you’re going to wake up tired of writ­ing your book (or MS, or what­ev­er it is). Oth­er days you’re going to wake up tired of the whole idea of writ­ing itself. Have a plan for those days. Get away from it. Go some­where. Do some­thing dif­fer­ent. Kick back. Rake the lawn. OR: do the ‘grunt work’ on those days (like look­ing stuff up, ver­i­fy­ing facts, etc)–the stuff you know you’re going to have to do some­day any­way. Don’t even attempt to do the actu­al “writ­ing” on those days. Use them to do the ‘house-keep­ing’ work; the ‘non-fun’ stuff.
    Also: what’s worked well for me late­ly: write stuff out of order. (We have com­put­ers to move it into the right order lat­er). Do this and it tends to stay fresh with­in itself. Start at “A” and con­tin­ue in a long straight line and it can some­times get stale and trail off into kind of par­o­dy of itself. This has real­ly helped me late­ly. Write the dif­fer­ent pieces out of order.

  • james black says:

    i have all ways thought that an author should have at lest a hands on knowl­edge of what he is writ­ing . i guess it , at lest for me gives them an hon­est cred­i­bil­i­ty. for exam­ple , a book on child rear­ing writ­ten by a non breed­er . or a book on box­ing by an author that’s nev­er been in a fight.thanks for your time .

  • edgardo j says:

    After read­ing this I tried writ­ing away from the com­put­er and I have to say it actu­al­ly helped. Just some­thing about writ­ing with my hand instead of typ­ing brought a deep­er con­cen­tra­tion to what I was doing. I tried cre­at­ing emo­tions instead of just telling them in my writ­ing. I don’t think it came out per­fect but its def­i­nite­ly bet­ter than what I had before. He has some great incites on writ­ing. Glad I read this.

  • Stu Lev says:

    Great post. Fine advice on writ­ing, using one’s imag­i­na­tion is always chal­leng­ing and mys­te­ri­ous. Some­times a cup of cof­fee spurs us on. Oth­er times we need to dis­tance our­selves from the mate­r­i­al for a spell to be able to see what part of our project has real val­ue and worth. Writ­ers block can hit us in some inten­si­ty at any­time. yet if the words always flowed like a water­fall with no effort at all would we view them as an accom­plish­ment? No. We always have to chal­lenge our­selves to see how far we can grow, learn and strive for excel­lence. Thanks for the great writ­ing tips. Here’s a cool free writ­ing source.

  • Hector says:

    Fan­tas­tic insights. Thank you, i will prac­tice some of these sug­ges­tions.

  • Tom says:

    Tip #3 is use­ful in oth­er appli­ca­tions as well. As an under­grad­u­ate phi­los­o­phy stu­dent, I had one par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult course with long essay exams. I would study end­less­ly and still do poor­ly until I learned to stop study­ing one full day before the exam and sim­ply play — go hik­ing, watch a movie, be with friends. What­ev­er it was, I was not think­ing about the mate­r­i­al for the course. I walked the half mile to class think­ing only about the walk itself. Once I learned this, my essays were clear, con­cise, and net­ted me an A on all the remain­ing essays for the course.

  • Tip nr. 8: for­get my tips and WRITE!

  • hermes birkin says:

    Won­der­ful share of this great job. Thanks for such much infor­ma­tion.

  • ernest says:

    I am a tiller and I won’t vis­ite and get

  • Gurdjieff says:

    Very prac­ti­cal and help­ful. I came across some of these read­ing ‘A Move­able Feast’, but not all of them and not arranged in this way. Thank you.

  • Open Culture says:

    Does any­one hap­pen to know what Face­book page just men­tioned our post? Thanks in advance for let­ting us know.nCheers,nDan/editor

  • Ada Sin Hache says:

    I’m men­tion­ing your post too and shar­ing. I read it on DM’s wall. I real­ly eno­joyed it, thanks!

  • Delphinus13 says:

    Doc­trine Man’s

  • optimia developments says:

    Thanks for your great infor­ma­tion, the con­tents are qui­et interesting.I will be wait­ing for your next post.

    free online cours­es

  • Sean says:

    Inter­est­ing tips and meth­ods to keep writ­ing. Not for­get­ting Hem­ming­way’s style, some of these ideas are for straight nov­el­ists and not good advice for the mod­ern hack who wants to write super-best-sell­ers!

  • ebookspdfs says:

    Great post. Nice sug­ges­tions on writ­ing, using one’s imag­i­na­tion is always chal­leng­ing and hard to over­come. Some­times a cup of coffee/tea spurs us on. Oth­er times we need to dis­tance our­selves from the mate­r­i­al for a spell to be able to see what part of our project has real val­ue and worth. Writ­ers block can hit us in some inten­si­ty at any­time. yet if the words always flowed like a water­fall with no effort at all would we view them as an accom­plish­ment? No. We always have to chal­lenge ourselves/everyone around us to see how far we can grow, learn and strive for excel­lence. Thanks for the great writ­ing tips. Here’s a cool free writ­ing source.

  • Rajshree says:

    Thanks… very moti­vait­ing n tried n test­ed advice

  • H L Lowe says:

    Bril­liant post — I was inter­est­ed to read the part about writ­ing in pen­cil for the first draft as I tried that for the first time with my lat­est nov­el. It real­ly worked as Hem­ing­way said, that you get an extra chance to improve on it when you type it up on your PC. Also, it stopped me deleting,copying & past­ing, jump­ing back­wards and for­wards, when all I need­ed to do was get the first draft down on paper so the prop­er writ­ing craft could begin with the 2nd draft. I agree, up to a point, with a com­ment from Sean, when he says that ‘some of these ideas are for straight nov­el­ists and not good advice for the mod­ern hack who wants to write super-best-sell­ers!’ but I think you can adapt Hem­ing­way’s advice and apply it to mod­ern writ­ers and the mod­ern nov­el. Look­ing for­ward to next post — many thanks

  • Elizabeth Cooper says:

    Great post, I agree with the part about writ­ing in pen­cil. I did this with my first draft as well and I real­ly enjoyed typ­ing it into to my com­put­er after­wards. It gave me a chance to look at my first rough draft as a whole and make changes as I went.

  • Amir Sibboni says:

    Thanks for shar­ing

  • Laina Turner says:

    As an author myself, it’s always nice to come across expert advice… you can always learn some­thing new.

  • Jenifer Ransom says:

    I pre­fer using a pen to a pen­cil. Feels more flow­ing. It’s always been my habit to write first draft by hand. What would be the ben­e­fits of using a pen­cil over a pen? I am sure most of the old-time writ­ers used pens. Anyway…yes, great tips, thanks Papa H!

  • Smokin Joe says:

    The first should always be. GET OUT AND LIFE! http://youtu.be/vcy5mzwmhlY

  • Smokin Joe says:

    i’m retard, I meant to say, get out and live. I have a hard time catch­ing my mis­takes is this go round. Peace

  • Obat Jantung Bocor Tanpa Operasi says:

    I real­ly enjoy read­ing them every day. I’ve learned a lot from them. thanks for putting an effort to pub­lish this infor­ma­tion.

  • Ifeanyichukwu Aniebo says:

    Gur­d­ji­eff nailed it. ‘A Move­able Feast’ was by my side while I was writ­ing my sec­ond nov­el. It could not be there when I was writ­ing my first because I was in prison. For me ‘A Move­able Feast’ is my syn­onym for JOY. Did Hem­ing­way come up with that title? Bril­liant!

  • Timothy says:

    Great stuff about writ­ing!

  • Somshekhar Patil says:

    WOW!! Great mas­ter­ful sug­ges­tions from a great MASTER!!

  • Jim Aughney says:

    Hem­ing­way was writ­ing 80 or 90 years ago and maybe the pens weren’t as effi­cient as today.
    Pen­cil can always be erased if you make a mess where­as a few cor­rec­tions with ball­point are yuck.
    I’ve writ­ten songs and poems as well as 30 years dai­ly jour­nal­ism and pen­cil works very well in songs/music — just erase Dmaj and put in C.
    Hem­ing­way would inspire me to write a nov­el.
    That idea of leav­ing some­thing for the next day is exact­ly how film-mak­ers work with TV dra­mas etc — leave some­thing about to hap­pen.

  • David Oak says:

    Very help­ful to any­one want­i­ng to write with hon­esty and clar­i­ty.

  • NutiMed says:

    Thanks for shar­ing.
    Thank Ernest Hem­ing­way :)

  • Johin Rastogi says:

    Just admir­ing your work.

  • Tony says:

    Over­abun­dance is more like it.

  • Joan Condon says:

    Today I wrote a com­plete sen­tence.

  • Saira says:

    Thank you for this! I am so glad I came across such a piece. Reblog­ging!

  • Oue says:

    Hem­ing­way’s “short, declar­a­tive sen­tences,” are poor­ly con­struct­ed to a tru­ly remark­able degree. They have an ama­teur­ish sound to them that is so promi­nent, I am aston­ished more peo­ple (espe­cial­ly lit­er­ary crit­ics) have not point­ed this out. I know that Hem­ing­way is often con­sid­ered “The Great­est Writer Who Ever Lived” by many peo­ple, and his prose fre­quent­ly receives an inor­di­nate amount of praise. I can­not under­stand this. Pro­fes­sion­al edi­tors rou­tine­ly REJECT sto­ries that are writ­ten like Hem­ing­way’s, often sim­ply BECAUSE of the writ­ing. It is lit­er­al­ly the worst prose of any sup­pos­ed­ly “great” writer in all of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture.

    For exam­ple, here is a bit of typ­i­cal Hem­ing­way prose from one of his books:

    “It was very late and every­one had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shad­ow the leaves of the tree made against the elec­tric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew set­tled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was qui­et and he felt the dif­fer­ence. The two wait­ers inside the cafe knew that the old man was a lit­tle drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave with­out pay­ing, so they kept watch on him.”

    ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

    Besides being astound­ing­ly bor­ing, there are so many things wrong with this pas­sage (like most of Hem­ing­way’s prose in gen­er­al) that it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, it reads very odd­ly. It feels like some­one has awk­ward­ly spliced togeth­er sev­er­al dif­fer­ent sen­tences to make even SHORTER sen­tences. It feels stilt­ed. It feels like some­one has gone in with scis­sors and snipped out cer­tain words that prob­a­bly should be there (a com­mon Hem­ing­way habit), mak­ing it sound jar­ring and dis­joint­ed. (Hem­ing­way did­n’t like “big words,” what­ev­er THOSE ulti­mate­ly are.) Ama­teur writ­ers (and bad writ­ers) often try to force their writ­ing to sound a cer­tain way (which we know that Hem­ing­way did, since he wrote about this con­stant­ly), to give them­selves a prose voice of depth and pro­fun­di­ty that they don’t nat­u­ral­ly have, and it shows. Such efforts fre­quent­ly sound stilt­ed, awk­ward, and unnat­ur­al, just like the above pas­sage. It’s easy to tell when a writer is delib­er­ate­ly inter­fer­ing with the nat­ur­al process of smooth­ly putting words on a page, and sea­soned pro­fes­sion­als don’t do this. And unfor­tu­nate­ly, pret­ty much all of Hem­ing­way’s writ­ing sounds rather like the above quote.

    Hem­ing­way had an awful lot to say about how to craft one’s own style of writ­ing (which, accord­ing to author Stephen King, is quite impos­si­ble). Hem­ing­way had all kinds of grand lit­er­ary the­o­ries and prin­ci­ples about how he thought writ­ing SHOULD be, and it’s often much more inter­est­ing to read what Hem­ing­way wrote about HOW to write, rather than to read his actu­al books — anoth­er sure sign of a bad (or ama­teur) writer. Hem­ing­way came up with a lot of these ideas when he was a young and inex­pe­ri­enced writer, and he unfor­tu­nate­ly stuck with most of them his entire life. The most noto­ri­ous of them is his “Ice­berg The­o­ry of Writ­ing,” the idea that 80–90 per­cent of your sto­ry should exist “below the sur­face” (unwrit­ten.) It sounds great on paper, but in prac­tice, unless the 10 per­cent of the sto­ry that you actu­al­ly DO write is very, very inter­est­ing, you prob­a­bly won’t end up with much of a good sto­ry. I know writ­ers who strug­gle to write down even just 60 to 70 per­cent of the sto­ry they want to tell, and even then, it can be dif­fi­cult to keep a sto­ry inter­est­ing. 10 per­cent is slim pick­ings indeed. This like­ly helps explain why Hem­ing­way’s sto­ries are often so dra­mat­i­cal­ly dull, and don’t trans­late well to film; not much hap­pens in them. They’re not very inter­est­ing. Unlike the sto­ries of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose sto­ries make aston­ish­ing dra­mat­ic movies, and whom I con­sid­er to be a vast­ly supe­ri­or writer to Hem­ing­way.

    So in sum­ma­ry, with his forced, unnat­ur­al writ­ing, awk­ward and cramped short sen­tences, and dull, undra­mat­ic sto­ries, why is Hem­ing­way so famous? I think it’s just an acci­dent, real­ly. I think he just hap­pened to be in the right place at the right time, and for no oth­er rea­son. Edi­tors fre­quent­ly say that there are absolute­ly no rules in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness, about why one writer becomes famous, and anoth­er does not. If it hap­pens, then it hap­pens. I think Hem­ing­way is just an over­all bad writer who got very, very lucky – and I think he has been unfair­ly held up for years before the rest of us as what a writer SHOULD be, despite his rather bor­ing sto­ries, bad­ly-writ­ten prose, and unnat­u­ral­ly cramped-sound­ing short sen­tences.

  • Martin says:

    I am very inter­est­ed writ­ing nov­els, EBooks and sto­ries, but I am not sure how to write the top notch nov­el, I did a Google search and found one of the guide it helps me to write top notch nov­el book with­in few days, The method explain in the guide it cre­at­ed me to think dif­fer­ent­ly, I felt some writer had come to my mind and I done per­fect­ly, Before writ­ing any nov­el, books or sto­ries, I rec­om­mend­ed this guide to all, before writ­ing any E‑books read at least one time.
    Check here » ( go2l.ink/novel ) «
    Writ­ing good eBooks is one of the good skill set

  • Ronnie says:

    Hel­lo Guys I Real­ly Like This a Lot. I Must Thank­ful to you for Shar­ing this Impor­tant Infor­ma­tion. Hem­ing­way was writ­ing 70 or 80 years ago and maybe the pens weren’t as effi­cient as today.

  • Marianne says:

    Inter­est­ing. Well before I saw these posts, I was get­ting a nov­el togeth­er by writ­ing inde­pen­dent blocks com­plete­ly sep­a­rate­ly. Of course, I know how the parts tie togeth­er, but I am writ­ing them as ideas come. This way, I nev­er have a writ­ers “block”.

    I loved read­ing the posts but I find that try­ing to force some­one else’s meth­ods onto one­self might not be the best way to write. Still, I appre­ci­ate every­one’s ideas. Mar­i­anne

  • Paul Sisco says:

    It was my favorite Amer­i­can poet William Car­los Williams who said of writ­ing some­thing to the effect of .… “…99% of what you will write isn’t worth the paper its writ­ten on, but %100 is worth less unless you put the pen­cil to the paper.

    writ­ers write, that’s key.

  • JOSH MEDELLE says:

    Thank u for your article…it real­ly helped me a lot

  • Mithun das says:

    Nice tips, you are great to describe

  • Radhika Roy says:

    can you give a way for seo

  • Apendu Ganguly says:

    Anoth­er very impor­tant tip which Ernest Hem­ing­way per­haps for­got to men­tion is using sim­ple lan­guage.
    “Old Man and the Sea” is a clas­sic exam­ple of sim­ple lan­guage.

  • AsfandBoss1122 says:

    I am very much grate­ful for your efforts put on this arti­cle,
    This arti­cle is very infor­ma­tive, updat­ed and trans­par­ent. Thanks for shar­ing this kind of great work.

  • Gerald says:

    While com­pos­ing an orig­i­nal an essay­ist ought to make liv­ing indi­vid­u­als; indi­vid­u­als not char­ac­ters. A per­son is a car­toon.

  • Animal says:

    this site is very good

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.