All aspiring writers[1] should take an hour or two to read Ernest Hemingway on Writing. At just 140 pages, it needn’t take long—though fully appreciating and absorbing all it offers could take a lifetime, as well as periodic revisiting and re-reading. Hemingway has his admirers and his critics (don’t we all!) but there’s really no arguing he was a master of his craft who worked hard at it. And though he claimed to eschew any discussion of writing for fear of jinxing himself, he frequently discussed his own writing and editing habits, approach, and philosophy. The book collects these thoughts from their various sources—letters to other authors and his publisher, interviews, his books, etc.—and sorts them into 13 chapters.
Hemingway’s takes on many aspects of the challenges of writing are valuable. Some may seem to apply more readily to fiction writers than non-fiction, but many are universal—or at least can be rotated just slightly to identify their non-fiction corollary. Rather than analyze or critique his rightness or wrongness—I truly wouldn’t dare—I’ll just share a few of my favorite quotes and hope they inspire you to think about your own writing endeavors and adventures slightly differently in the future.
“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.”
To Maxwell Perkins, 1945
Selected Letters, p. 594
My temptation is always to write too much. I keep it under control so as not to have to cut out crap and re-write. Guys who think they are geniuses because they have never learned how to say no to a typewriter are a common phenomenon. All you have to do is get a phony style and you can write any amount of words.
To Maxwell Perkins, 1940
Selected Letters, p. 501
This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.
Death in the Afternoon, p. 54
And finally:
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.
To Horace Liveright, 1925
Selected Letters, p. 161
True of more than just punctuation, too.
This is just a taste—do your writing a favor and spend some time inside the mind of one of America’s greatest.
[1] Relative to the greats, we’re all just aspiring, aren’t we?
Comments