Ernest Hemingway’s Top 13 Writing Tips
Hemingway. The single word elicits a dreamy, almost romantic, response from countless readers and writers.
Ernest Hemingway is known for his simple, effortless prose in stories like The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Much of Hemingway’s writing advice lives on through his letters. He often wrote to editors and fellow writers, and his best advice is compiled in the book Ernest Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips.
Here are the top 13 lessons I’ve learned from Hemingway:
1. View your writing like an iceberg.
“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.” -Hemingway
Hemingway believed that a writer’s knowledge of a topic would shine beyond the words they put on the page.
If you know a topic well enough, your understanding will implicitly improve your writing. Intimacy with your material not only gives you ammunition for your work, but it gives you confidence.
If you’re writing about a topic you don’t understand well enough, find a way to become more familiar with it. For example, before writing the national bestseller Roots, Alex Haley spent time in the dark recesses of a ship. His experience gave him a small taste of the injustice and fear felt by African American slaves imprisoned in claustrophobia-inducing quarters. Haley’s understanding of that experience enhanced his ability to tell an authentic, heartwrenching story.
2. Prepare to waste a lot of paper.
“For Christ sake [sic] 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.” -Hemingway, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
Artists need to make numerous sketches before they produce a masterpiece. Chefs often need to spoil several meals before they nail a recipe. Public speakers need to practice a speech dozens of times before they present in front of an audience. You shouldn’t expect writing to be any different.
Creating a piece worth reading — whether it’s a story, a poem, or a book — will take far more time than you expect. It will plumb the depths of your patience, stretch the limits of your willpower, and test the capacity of your wastebasket.
3. If you’re always trying to get better, writing will never be easy.
“I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can’t expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.” -Hemingway
Hemingway was one of the best writers in the world, but he never saw himself as having “made it” as a writer. He pushed to improve and acknowledged that “writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done.” There is always room to grow as a writer, and the best writers find the most room for growth.
It’s like what legendary writing professor Bill Glavin used to say: “Remember that bad writers think that writing is easy; good writers think writing is hard, and I think there is a lesson in there somewhere.”
4. Don’t seek praise for unfinished work.
“So I am going to [continue writing For Whom The Bell Tolls] until it is finished. I wish I could show it to you so far because I am very proud of it but that is bad luck too. So is talking about it.” -Hemingway, in a letter to Maxwell Perkins
People tend to accept credit before doing the work. Think of all the people who post on Facebook the moment they begin training for a marathon. Or the friends who post a “Before” picture on the first day of their new fad diet. Or the writers who tell the Instagram world that they just wrote the first page of their novel.
Don’t be that person. Be the person who works in humble, quiet isolation, then emerges from hibernation having completed something of substance.
Sure, it’s fine to workshop ideas with a few tight friends or tell your family why you’re spending so much time alone in the basement. But don’t take public credit for something you haven’t done yet.
5. In fact, don’t expect praise at all.
“You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights and the sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you as you read them, so many times have you read them.” -Hemingway
Writing demands hours of silent, thankless work. Are you willing to invest that time?
Do you think the best writers on Medium or the Hugo Award winners or the Pulitzer Prize winners were showered with roses from adoring fans the minute they first picked up a pen?
No, they put in hours upon hours of work. They woke up when the city was asleep or stayed up when others had called it a night. They put in the time when the lights were off to become someone worthy of being in the spotlight.
6. Write for yourself rather than for anyone else.
“I think we should never be too pessimistic about what we know we have done well because we should have some reward and the only reward is that which is within ourselves…Publicity, admiration, adulation, or simply being fashionable are all worthless…” -Hemingway
Often I write stories that don’t perform as well as I had hoped.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve written a story, then it performed worse than I expected. As much as I try, I can’t stop myself but setting expectations for how my stories will perform after I hit “publish.” But I cannot tell you a single time that I wrote something and later thought the time I put into that story wasn’t worth it. Not a single time.
Whenever I finish a piece, I feel a surge of pride in what I have accomplished. Writing offers intrinsic benefits. Creating something from nothing is a worthwhile experience, all on its own.
7. The act of writing is intoxicating.
“When I don’t write, I feel like shit.” -Hemingway
After I sit down at my desk and get over the initial hump of typing the first few words of a new story, I become captivated in the work. Writing becomes more addicting the more you do it.
Writing is both the most challenging and the most fulfilling thing you will ever do. It allows you to positively impact the lives of others while also refining the way you view the world.
8. Use simple words to say powerful things.
“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
More than perhaps any other writer in history, Hemingway was known for his ability to write in simple, understandable prose.
Here are the average reading levels of Hemingway’s most famous works:
- The Sun Also Rises — 4th-grade reading level
- The Old Man and the Sea — 5th-grade reading level
- For Whom the Bell Tolls — 5th-grade reading level
- A Farewell to Arms — 6th-grade reading level
In other words, every one of these books can be read by someone who has barely gotten their first pimple. And yet, Hemingway’s novels dealt with weighty topics: the meaning of life, the struggle between humanity and nature, the travesty of war, and the beauty of love in comparison to war.
Hemingway knew how complicated these topics were because he had lived through many of these situations. He was injured in World War I in 1918. He experienced love and loss, including marrying four times. But he found a way to communicate complex topics in simple, powerful ways.
9. Strive to write something that will outlive you.
“And if [your writing] is good enough, it will last as long as there are human beings.” -Hemingway
Writing is one of the best ways for any of us to leave a legacy. And related to points 5 and 6 above, aspiring to leave a legacy doesn’t just mean getting public recognition. Sure, Hemingway received loads of that, but legacy goes beyond public praise.
I hope that even after I die, my family and friends will learn more about me from the words I’ve written online and offline, including what I’ve written in journals and notebooks throughout my life. Writing keeps us alive.
10. Invent from real experience.
“Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen. That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best — make it all up — but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.” -Hemingway
Truth is every bit as important in fiction as it is in nonfiction. Even when you’re inventing new worlds and situations, you must always create from a basis of truth. Readers can tell if a character performs an action that doesn’t agree with the character’s backstory, ethics, or persona.
“Good writing is true writing,” said Hemingway. “If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.”
Use reality to inform fantasy. Inject fact into your fiction. Build fake castles out of real wood and nails. Doing so is the only way to help readers get lost in the world you’ve created.
11. Some days are harder than others. Persist.
“There’s no rule on how it is to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” -Hemingway
When I first sat down to write today, I probably wrote 20 words in the first 45 minutes. Ideas were flowing like peanut butter rather than wine.
Then I decided to put myself into a different headspace by listening to some music. Gradually, ideas began to flow more freely, and I was able to write a bit faster and better.
Every day is different, and it’s refreshing to hear that Hemingway felt the same way. Every author has good days and bad days. The key is to persist through the bad days and fully take advantage of the good days.
12. Write evergreen content — not current events.
“Then when you have more time read another book called War and Peace by Tolstoi and see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it, because they are no longer either true or important, if they ever were more than topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are. Do not let them deceive you about what a book should be because of what is in the fashion now.” -Hemingway
It’s tempting to inject current events into your writing, but doing so generally isn’t worth it. Why? Because the minute you talk about Trump’s election, the Kavanaugh hearings, or the coronavirus, you’ve set a time horizon on your piece. You’ve implicitly signaled to readers that your story is valuable right now, but you don’t expect it to be relevant in a year — let alone ten years.
In contrast, “evergreen content” is content that is always relevant: articles about how to write a good story, books that teach how to live a better life, etc.
Those types of stories have been around for centuries, and they don’t have a shelf life. That’s not to say that you should never write about current events; just don’t put them where they don’t belong.
Write about things that are true today and will be true tomorrow as well.
13. Encourage others to write.
“Some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence.” -Hemingway
It’s easy to look at all of the writing advice out there and question whether writing about writing is worthwhile. It is. Helping another person develop a skill and enjoy a craft is always a meaningful purpose.
Embrace anything you can do to help another person learn and grow. In so doing, you will also learn and grow.
Do anything in your power to encourage creativity, art, and passion in others.
We can learn a lot from Hemingway’s passion for his work, persistence at his craft, and his focus on using ordinary language to express extraordinary ideas.
If you’re looking for more Hemingway inspiration, check out the book Ernest Hemingway on Writing edited by Larry W. Phillips.
Happy writing!
