Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

Source: openculture.com.

As I work to become a better writer came across this advice from Hemingway and George Orwell. Really good stuff.

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.

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.

2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.

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.

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.

3: Never think about the story when you’re not working.

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 theEsquire 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:

4: When it’s time to work again, always start by reading what you’ve written so far.

T0 maintain continuity, Hemingway made a habit of reading over what he had already written before going further. In the 1935 Esquire article, he writes:

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.

5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.

Close observation of life is critical to good writing, said Hemingway. The key is to not only watch and listen closely to external events, but to also notice any emotion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and identify precisely what it was that caused the emotion. If you can identify the concrete action or sensation that caused the emotion and present it accurately and fully rounded in your story, your readers should feel the same emotion. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes about his early struggle to master this:

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.

6: Be Brief.

Hemingway was contemptuous of writers who, as he put it, “never learned how to say no to a typewriter.”

George Orwell's writing rules                 

George Orwell, writer of Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm, began his career as an advertising copywriter. This experience helped him to create a few simple writing rules, which we can use to ensure our writing is clear, direct and effective.

1  Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print

INSTEAD OF ... cutting-edge producers

USE ... leading producers, the kind of producers that others follow, the industry's most original producers

2  Never use a long word where a short one will do

INSTEAD OF ... expeditive, accomodating or monumental

USE ... quick, helpful or large

3 If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out

INSTEAD OF ... Jessica Fletcher, Penguin's newest, freshest writer, is already exploring themes of great importance - faith, familial bonds - in her first two novels, Banjo Mansion and Yes, I Have Potato

USE ... Jessica Fletcher, explores faith and familial bonds in her novels, Banjo Mansion and Yes, I Have Potato

4 Never use the passive where you can use the active

INSTEAD OF ... It was understood by the team that Susan's visit was a great success

USE ... The team understood that Susan's visit was a great success

5 Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent

INSTEAD OF ... In the spirit of carpe diem, the management team blue-skied proposals on the aortic behaviour of cupid's arrow

USE ... The managers took the opportunity to think creatively about love

6 Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous