Hemingway's Craft | Research

He wrote standing up. He wrote in pencil. He wrote every morning until noon and then he stopped.

This is what he knew about writing.

The Iceberg

Seven-eighths of an iceberg is underwater. You do not see it. But it is there and it holds up what you see.

Writing works the same way. Know everything. Write almost nothing. The reader feels the weight of what you left out.

He said it this way: “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The reader will feel those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.”

But you must know them. If you leave things out because you do not know them, the story is worthless. That is the difference.

The Rules

He learned them at the Kansas City Star. He was eighteen.

Use short sentences.
Use short first paragraphs.
Use vigorous English.
Be positive, not negative.

He never forgot them.

Why It Works

Every word pulls weight. Virginia Woolf saw it. She said his sentences were “fine and sharp, like winter days when the boughs are bare against the sky.”

Short sentences make the reader work. “The wine was good. I drank much of it.” You understand why without being told.

He called it architecture. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”

The Words

Use concrete words. Not honor. Not glory. Not courage. Those words were obscene to him after the war. Use the names of villages. The numbers of roads. The numbers of regiments and the dates.

Use strong verbs. Cut the adjectives. Cut the adverbs. If the verb is right you do not need them.

Use short words. Anglo-Saxon words. Common words. The words people actually say.

Dialogue

His characters do not say what they mean. They talk around it. They talk about drinks and the weather and the view. The meaning is underneath.

Read “Hills Like White Elephants.” Two people discuss an abortion. They never use the word. That is how people talk.

The Work

He wrote in the morning. First light. He stopped at noon or when he felt empty. Not depleted. Empty but not depleted.

He stopped when he knew what would happen next. That way the next morning was easy.

He never emptied the well. He left something in it. The springs fed it at night.

He rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms forty-seven times. Someone asked him what was hard about it. “Getting the words right,” he said.

His final manuscripts were one-fifth the length of his first drafts.

What He Said

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

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

“Never compete with living writers. You don’t know whether they’re good or not. Compete with the dead ones you know are good.”

What to Read

He gave a list to a young writer in 1934:

Huckleberry Finn. “The best book an American ever wrote.”
Madame Bovary.
Dubliners.
Anna Karenina.
War and Peace.
The Brothers Karamazov.

He read a book and a half a day. Plus three newspapers.

The Lesson

Know more than you write. Use concrete words. Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Then cut some more.

Write one true sentence. Then write another.