Chapter 153 - Ernest Hemingway on Writing
What I learned from Ernest Hemingway
Today’s Chapter is based on the book “Ernest Hemingway on Writing” by Larry W. Phillips.
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, famous for his terse, economical prose style and for works such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea. He became an international literary figure, winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, and his adventurous, highly public life helped cement his status as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
Here’s what I learned:
Qualities of a Writer
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
— Stephen King
Ernest Hemingway, one of the most influential figures in modern literature, offers timeless insights into the craft of writing through his reflections compiled in Larry W. Phillips’ book. At the heart of Hemingway’s philosophy lies the belief that a great writer must possess certain indispensable qualities, notably honesty and imagination. He argues that imagination, when rooted in genuine experience, allows a writer to create worlds so vivid that readers mistake fiction for reality. This isn’t about fabricating wild tales out of thin air but about drawing from life’s truths to infuse stories with authenticity.
“…whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about.”
— Ernest Hemingway
As a matter of fact, Hemingway mentions that “It is the one thing [imagination] beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more truly he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think that the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting.” This passage reveals that a writer who has lived through adventures, heartbreaks and observations can channel these experiences into narratives that resonate profoundly. Without honesty, imagination becomes hollow, a mere exercise in deception that fails to connect with readers.
In the same line of thought, Hemingway was not a big fan of using big words. He believed that a writer must be truthful to the story’s needs, avoiding the temptation to showcase cleverness at the expense of narrative integrity. This quality demands self-awareness: recognizing when one’s ego interferes with the work’s purity. As Hemingway once said, “Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).”
Hemingway’s sparse style, often called the “iceberg theory,” where much is left unsaid, stems from this principle. By omitting the obvious, he trusts the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps, creating a more engaging experience.
“No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.”
— Ernest Hemingway
This reminds me of what we have learned from Richard Feynman. According to him, the secret of learning lays in understanding the true essence of a concept rather than learning names through memorisation. As a matter of fact, Feynman believed that to truly understand a concept, one must be able to explain it to a child with simple words rather than by using complex words. As Mortimer Adler once said, “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
This illusion of knowledge is extremely dangerous as going beyond your circle of competence and not knowing it can cause serious issues. And, to make it worse, Feynman mentions that this fragility of knowledge is also susceptible among experts. As he once said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way-by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
— Richard Feynman
Furthermore, for Hemingway, it was important for a writer to be fit physically due to the emotional drain of the creative process. As he explains, “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 that 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.”
Finally, Hemingway understood that to be a writer, one needs to be okay with being lonely, mainly due to the fact that you must be able to ignore the noise. As Stephen King once said, “Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don’t have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
“For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket. You feel you have to publish crap to make money to live and let live. All write [right] but if you write enough and as well as you can there will be the same amount of masterpiece material (as we say at Yale). You can’t think well enough to sit down and write a deliberate masterpiece and if you could get rid of [Gilbert] Seldes and those guys that nearly ruined you and turn them out as well as you can and let the spectators yell when it is good and hoot when it is not you would be all right.”
— Ernest Hemingway
Habits of a Writer
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
— Stephen King
Ernest Hemingway’s working habits reveal a disciplined approach to creativity, emphasizing rhythym, restraint and renewal to avoid burnout. He viewed writing as a marathon, requiring strategies to maintain momentum over time. In fact, central to his method is to never stop writing unless you know what to write next. He explains, “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.”
This method not only prevented exhaustion, but allowed your subconscious to work on your ideas overnight. He argues to “Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start. Once you are into the novel it is as cowardly to worry about whether you can go on the next day as to worry about having to go into inevitable action. You have to go on. So there is no sense to worry. You have to learn that to write a novel. The hard part about a novel is to finish it.”
“I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris.”
— Ernest Hemingway
In terms of writing, Hemingway is a huge fan of writing in pencils over using a typewriter because it gave you three opportunities to revise your text. This multi-stage process ensures a better polished product. He mentions, “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 that you can better it easier.“
This reminds me of what we have learned from Stephen King on how to write and, the most important tenet is to keep things simple. As a matter of fact, he provides us a list of things we must avoid in order to write better:
Avoid passive verbs: King believes that “With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense.”
Avoid the overuse of adverbs: King explains that “The adverb is not your friend. Adverbs, he said sternly. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/ she isn’t expressing himself/ herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.” Or as Mark Twain once said, “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Avoid the use of other verbs outside of “say” in a dialogue attribution: King mentions that “The best form of dialogue attribution is said, as in he said, she said, Bill said, Monica said.”
Furthermore, King believes that the root of most bad writing comes from fear. As a matter of fact, a bad writer usually thinks he or she needs to use adverbs or complex words because they are fearful that he or she isn’t expressing himself or herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across. However, King believes that these actions tend to lead to opposite effects.
King mentions that “Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. (…) Good writing is also about making good choices when it comes to picking the tools you plan to work with.” According to King, if you don’t have a good toolbox, an easy way to write better is to strictly use noun-verb sentences; once again, a proof of the power of keeping things simple.
“Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones (Plums deify!) have a kind of poetic weight that’s nice. The simplicity of noun-verb construction is useful—at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing.”
— Stephen King
Finally, King mentions the necessity to rewrite in order to keep your writing as simple as possible. King explains that the best lesson he received in terms of writing came from his English literature teacher, John Gould, who once told him, “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
As a matter of fact, King’s approach to writing involves a structured process that begins with the first draft. Once that is done, he recommends a period of rest before beginning the rewriting process. As he explains, “If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six- week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings than it is to kill your own.”
King mentions that in his rewriting process, or the second draft, he will try to remove all unnecessary words in order to speed up the story. His formula is simple: “2nd Draft = 1st Draft minus 10%.” A formula to works every time.
Competing Against the Best
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
— Stephen King
As we have previously learned, Stephen King mentions that to become a proficient writer, one must immerse themselves in both reading and writing. He emphasizes the importance of consuming a wide variety of literature to develop a keen sense of what constitutes good and bad writing. This practice not only helps in refining one’s own style but also serves as a wellspring of inspiration.
As a matter of fact, his biggest advice for aspiring writers is to “strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.” King mentions this because he believes that television and most likely social media nowadays are a distraction and make people forget the importance of reading and immersing oneself into the written world.
“But TV came relatively late to the King household, and I’m glad. I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.”
—Stephen King
King’s own journey as a writer began with imitation, a common starting point for many aspiring authors. He recalls that when he was younger, he would spent a lot time either in bed or at home reading through comic books, Tom Swift and Dawson and Jack London’s bloodcurdling animal tales. This certainly helped him to improve as a writer as he would start writing his own stories based on what he read. As King once said, “Imitation preceded creation.”
Furthermore, King believes that reading is a great way to build your vocabulary. In fact, he firmly believes that building one’s vocabulary should not be done through conscious effort, but through the natural process of reading widely. As he once said, “Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it. (You’ll be doing that as you read, of course ... but that comes later.)”
Similarly to King, Ernest Hemingway believed it was primordial for a good writer to read a lot. But more importantly, rather than reading recent works, he believed in reading the works of the great authors of the past, as those are your true competitors. As he once said, “you shouldn’t read the shit about liveing writers. You should always write your best against dead writers.”
In fact, he explains, “I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you.” As such, he recommends any new writers to read some Mark Twain. He writes, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had.”
Hemingway lists out authors that he was greatly inspired by and those who he had to compete against on a daily basis. He mentions, “Turgenieff to me is the greatest writer there ever was. Didn’t write the greatest books, but was the greatest writer… Chekov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer. Tolstoi was a prophet. Maupassant was a professional writer, Balzac was a professional writer, Turgenieff was an artist.”
Finally, he believed that if you do decide to become a writer, be ready to complete against the best of the best. As he mentions, “You should always write your best against dead writers that we know what stature (not stature: evocative power) that they have and beat them one by one.”
“There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.”
— Ernest Hemingway
In Hemingway’s mind, masterpieces only appear from the sheer act of writing “as well as you can” against the highest standards history had to offer. In his view, the writer’s life is a solitary, long-distance race against the immortals, with the reader’s honest reaction as the only meaningful finish line. Personally, I believe there is some truth in Hemingway’s philosophy. There is a reason why classics are still read to this day: they pass the test of time. He may be setting the bar extremely high, but successful people tend to compete in field where they believe they can be the best of the best.
For example, when Bill Gates was at Harvard University, he had the intention to become a mathematician, as he believe that math was the purest area of intellect. As he explains, “In my emerging worldview, the logic and rational thinking demanded by math were skills that could be used to master any subject. There was a hierarchy of intelligence: however good you were at math, that’s how good you could be at other subjects—biology, chemistry, history, even languages. My model, as simplistic as it was, seemed to be borne out at school, where I felt I could map a student’s math ability to their broader academic achievement.”
However, after a few classes at Harvard, he quickly realized that if he pursued mathematics, he would never reach the top as some of his classmates were way better than him. That’s when he decided to move on to work fully on becoming a computer programmer and which led to Gates starting Microsoft with Paul Allen.
“My inability to do better in that class forced me to reconsider how I thought of myself. I so deeply identified with being the smartest, the best. That status was a shield behind which I hid my insecurities. Up until then, I had experienced only a few situations in which I felt someone was hands-down better than I was in some intellectual endeavor that mattered to me, and in those cases I soaked up what they could teach me. This time was different. I was recognizing that while I had an excellent math brain, I didn’t have the gift of insight that sets apart the best mathematicians. I had talent but not the ability to make fundamental discoveries. I saw a vision of myself in ten years: teaching in a university but not good enough to do groundbreaking work. I wasn’t going to be a John Mather, operating in the zone where math touches the deep secrets of the universe.”
— Bill Gates
Beyond the Book
Read "Why Great Writers Write" by Farnam Street
Read "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" by Farnam Street
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