Ernest Hemingway on Writing

Larry W. Phillips

1999 • 160 pages

Ratings8

Average rating3.9

An assemblage of reflections on the nature of writing and the writer from one the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. Throughout Hemingway’s career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing—that it takes off “whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.” Despite this belief, by the end of his life he had done just what he intended not to do. In his novels and stories, in letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned articles on the subject, Hemingway wrote often about writing. And he wrote as well and as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived… This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself. —From the Preface by Larry W. Phillips

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Clifford Garstang

The book consists of quotations from Hemingway, arranged according to subject (Working Habits, Characters, Titles, Politics, etc.). The quotations are drawn from letters, books, interviews, and various other sources. Some of the quotations make great sound bites, but whether there is any useful advice in them is debatable. I suspect Hemingway would be horrified by this assemblage.

December 22, 2014

Thomas

A nice little book collecting notes on writing from Hemingway over his career and across his publications. It is probably foolhardy to read a book about a writer's habit in search of your own habit, but it is at least interesting to compare and contrast. I thought a lot about Stephen King's On Writing while reading this. King writes 10 pages or thereabouts a day. Hemingway might write 400 words according to this book. Neither is right nor wrong, it's just the work of the writer.

I took a lot of notes and made a lot of flags. Here are some that I particularly like:

Ch 1 What Writing Is & Does
* Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm (sic).

Ch 2 The Qualities of a Writer
* The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
* Good writing is true writing.
* Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?
Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

Ch 4 What to Write About
* The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life—and one is as good as the other.
* Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damn hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.
* Love is also a good subject as you might be said to have discovered. Other major subjects are the money from which we get riches and poores. Also avarice. ... Murder is a good one so get a swell murder into [your] next book and sit back.

Ch 5 Advice to Writers
* All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
* Remember to get the weather into your god damned book—weather is very important.

Ch 6 Working Habits
* Mice: Do you know what is going to happen when you write a story?
Y.C.: Almost never. I start to make it up and have happen what would happen as it goes along.
* The minute I quit trying to write the rest of it is easy.

Ch 7 Characters
* Keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to by symbols.

Ch 13 The Writer's Life
* ...Had never had the real old melancholia before and am glad to have had it so I know what people go through. It makes me more tolerant of what happened to my father.
* But [Bernard Berenson] 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...
* I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
* All criticism is shit anyway. Nobody knows anything about it except yourself.