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.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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

Image by Angela Rad­ules­cu via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It is some­times the case that a favorite writer isn’t ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing when it comes to talk­ing shop.  This has nev­er been so with the self-reveal­ing Toni Mor­ri­son, whose pub­lic appear­ances and inter­views often dupli­cate the expe­ri­ence of read­ing one of her novels—her voice draws you in, and before you know it, you’re part of a world all her own that she has giv­en you the priv­i­lege of join­ing for a short time.

This is the expe­ri­ence of read­ing her inter­view with Elis­sa Schap­pell in the Paris Review. Mor­ri­son dis­cours­es on sub­jects rang­ing from her per­son­al rou­tine and his­to­ry, to her iden­ti­ty as a writer and a woman, to the larg­er his­to­ry of slav­ery and the black lives she writes about. Woven through it all are obser­va­tions about her art that may or may not be of any use to bud­ding writ­ers, but which will cer­tain­ly make lovers of Mor­ri­son read her work a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. Some of her obser­va­tions are below:

• Write when you know you’re at your best. For her, this hap­pened to be the ear­ly morn­ing, pre-dawn hours, before her chil­dren woke up, since she worked full-time and feels she is “not very bright or very wit­ty or very inven­tive after the sun goes down.” Mor­ri­son describes her morn­ing rit­u­al this way:

I always get and make a cup of cof­fee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the cof­fee and watch the light come.

• “There’s a line between revis­ing and fret­ting” It’s impor­tant for a writer to know when they are “fret­ting,” because if some­thing isn’t work­ing, “it needs to be scrapped,” although in answer to whether she goes back over pub­lished work and wish­es she had fret­ted more, Mor­ri­son answers, “a lot. Every­thing.”
• A good edi­tor is “like a priest or a psy­chi­a­trist.” Mor­ri­son worked as an edi­tor for Ran­dom House for 20 years before she pub­lished her first nov­el. She observes the rela­tion­ship between writer and edi­tor by say­ing that get­ting the wrong one means that “you are bet­ter off alone.” One of the marks of a good edi­tor? She doesn’t “love you or your work,” there­fore offers crit­i­cism, not com­pli­ments.
• Don’t write with an audi­ence in mind, write for the char­ac­ters. Know­ing how to read your own work—with the crit­i­cal dis­tance of a good reader—makes you a “bet­ter writer and edi­tor.” For Mor­ri­son, this means writ­ing not with an audi­ence in mind, but with the char­ac­ters to go to for advice, to tell you “if the ren­di­tion of their lives is authen­tic or not.”
• Con­trol your char­ac­ters. Despite the ever-present and clichéd demand to “write what you know,” Mor­ri­son stu­dious­ly tries to avoid tak­ing char­ac­ter traits from peo­ple she knows. As she puts it: “mak­ing a lit­tle life for one­self by scav­eng­ing oth­er people’s lives is a big ques­tion, and it does have moral and eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions.” And as for keep­ing con­trol of her char­ac­ters, Mor­ri­son says “They have noth­ing on their minds but them­selves and aren’t inter­est­ed in any­thing but them­selves. So you can’t let them write your book for you.”
• Plot is like melody; it does­n’t need to be com­pli­cat­ed. Mor­ri­son sums up her approach to plot in Jazz and The Bluest Eye by say­ing “I put the whole plot on the first page.” Rather than con­struct­ing intri­cate plots with hid­den twists, she prefers to think of the plot in musi­cal terms as a “melody,” where the sat­is­fac­tion lies in rec­og­niz­ing it and then hear­ing the “echoes and shades and turns and piv­ots” around it.
• Style, like jazz, involves end­less prac­tice and restraint. Speak­ing of Jazz, Mor­ri­son tells she has always thought of her­self like a jazz musi­cian, “some­one who prac­tices and prac­tices and prac­tices in order to able to invent and to make his art look effort­less and grace­ful.” A large part of her “jazz” style, she says, is “an exer­cise in restraint, in hold­ing back.”
• Be your­self, but be aware of tra­di­tion. Of the diver­si­ty of African-Amer­i­can jazz musi­cians and singers, Mor­ri­son says “I would like to write like that. I would like to write nov­els that were unmis­tak­ably mine, but nev­er­the­less fit first into African Amer­i­can tra­di­tions and sec­ond of all, this whole thing called lit­er­a­ture.”

Most read­ers of Morrison’s work would argue that’s exact­ly what she’s done her whole career. Read the entire inter­view here and be sure to vis­it the com­plete archive of Paris Review inter­views online.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Ray Brad­bury Offers 12 Essen­tial Writ­ing Tips and Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture Saves Civ­i­liza­tion

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.