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.
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.
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.
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