Ernest Hemmingway needs no
introduction, and his advice on writing is widely quoted. Even so, some of it
bears repeating. The following advice on making a story ring true comes from Ernest Hemingway on Writing.
You
see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life
across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive.
So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You
can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is
beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things
aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible
4 that you can write the way I want to. [From a 1925 letter to Dr. C. E.
Hemingway.]
_____
What
I’ve been doing is trying to do country so you don’t remember the words after
you read it but actually have the Country. It is hard because to do it you have
to see the country all complete all the time you write and not just have a
romantic feeling about it. [From a 1924 letter to Edward O’Brien.]
_____
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. [From a 1934 letter to F.
Scott Fitzgerald.]
_____
When
writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer
can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is
possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the
people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting;
of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel.
If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he
is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then
he is showing off. [From Death in the
Afternoon, emphasis in original.]
Ernest Hemingway
on Writing is
easy reading and appropriate for all writers. If you want to learn from a
master, get a copy for your own library.
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