Hemingway's Six Tips for Writing Well.

I’ve started a small series where I take a few of my favorite writers and compile their best tips for writing. The first issue is about the old man himself, Hemingway.

Hemingway was a darn good writer. Few people would argue against that.

As typical of someone who is darn good at something, their methods and thinking are usually studied by people who wish to achieve that level. I’m not a darn good writer, so I looked to Hemingway for advice on writing.

Most of the best advice that Hemingway left behind was aggregated in the book, Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips. These include letters between Hemingway and his contemporaries (such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound) as well as the writings of prospective writers who sought out his advice.

From this, I observed six main themes that drove Hemingway’s writing.

Always be observing, then empathizing.

“When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen.”

Hemingway was obsessed with writing “true sentences.” Sentences that were accurate as possible to the meaning or scene they were trying to express. Whether that was how a certain setting looked or how a character reacts.  

To achieve this, he focused on his powers of observation. Find the words that perfectly matched what he saw, heard, smelt, and felt. Most importantly, listening. 

“Watch what happens today.” Hemingway once told a young prospective writer who had joined him on a fishing expedition. “If we get into a fish see exact it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you that emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped.”

“Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had.”

This reaches a whole another dimension when it comes to humans.

“The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn…”

To write a “true character” Hemingway tried to be as empathetic as possible. An interesting thought, since Hemingway was known to be a surly character. He had strong opinions, and lord have mercy for whoever told him otherwise. 

He was a different person when writing.

“As a man things are as they should or shouldn’t be. As a man you know who is right and who is wrong. You have to make decisions and enforce them. As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.”

To create true sentences, one must learn to observe and listen, then empathize. 

Keep the momentum.

Like all writers, Hemingway struggled with resistance and writer’s block. But like all great writers, he found ways to stay on track.

The first way was to end the day when you’re on a roll.

“Always [best] 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.”

The second way was to at the beginning of the next day, re-read your story up to the point you left off in order to keep the same flow.

“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. And remember to stop while you are still going good. That keeps it moving instead of having it die whenever you go on and write yourself out. When you do that you find that the next day you are pooped and can’t go on.”

Keep it simple.

“It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.”

Hemingway is known for his short, direct prose, one honed from years as a journalist. This simple prose allowed him to take complicated and profound subject matter and express it in a way that all people understood (The average reading level of his books hover around the fifth and sixth grade).

He achieved this with a ruthless focus on all aspects of his writing. Words were chosen with care, and adjectives were often omitted (he had a lifelong suspicion of them). Most sentences were short and to the point, with long sentences reserved for ones of importance. Even his punctuation was consciously simple.

My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.

*This article has some really interesting statistics on how Hemingway constructed his work compared to other writers of his time. Well worth checking out.

Always be improving.

Hemingway was competitive. In all forms of life, but especially in writing. While writing was something he did simply for the sake of, it was also something he did to be better than others. Not better than his contemporaries, though, but chasing the greats before him.

“[A writer] should have read everything so that he knows what he has to beat… The only people for a serious writer to compete with are the dead that he knows are good. It is like a miler running against the clock rather than simply trying to beat whoever is in the race with him. Unless he runs against time he will never know what he is capable of attaining.”

Hemingway wrote down a list of all the authors young writers should read and learn to emulate, which can be found here. 

Understand that you’ll never be as good as you can.

Despite his insistence on improving, Hemingway understood that his writing would never reach the level he believed it could.

…writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done—”

Writing is an activity of constant struggle. A struggle to find interesting topics and stories, and to write those stories in ways that are true, entertaining, and interesting. In trying to better yourself, it becomes even more difficult. It’s a grueling climb up a mountain that never ends.

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Stay the course.

Despite this, Hemingway advises staying the course. When the young prospective writer from earlier asked Hemingway if he could be a good writer, Hemingway told him in his usual abrupt fashion.

“If you work at it five years and you find you’re no good you can just as well shoot yourself then as now.”

When you say it like that, might as well give it a shot. 

For Hemingway, writing was a brutal, difficult experience that took everything out of him. (He used to describe it as “sitting down at my typewriter and bleeding”). But it was also a freeing experience for him, and he was never more satisfied than whenever he wrote a sentence he deemed true.