Title Ernest Hemingway on Writing

Author Ernest Hemingway Edited by Larry W. Phillips

Year Published 1999

Kind of Book Creative Process/Writing

How strongly I recommend it 7/10 

My Impressions This is a compilation of everything Hemingway wrote and said about writing. It is mostly a book of quotes. A fairly short read. I wouldn't personally spend money on it because it is so short, but worth it if you can find it cheap or free!

Date Read Dec 2019

Practical Takeaways

  • Be disciplined

  • Be a disinterested writer (not have an agenda?)

  • Have a 'shit detector' when writing

  • Have a sense of justice and injustice when writing

  • Be honest when writing

  • Write for yourself and for who you love

  • Don't expect writing to ever become easy as long as you are always striving to be better

  • Use your pain to write and be faithful to it

  • Write what you know about

  • Always be writing something new ie. Don't make your current book just like your last one

  • Include a murder in your novel 'and sit back [and wait for the success]'

  • Write one true sentence and then go from there

  • If you get off track in your writing just go back to your one true sentence and start from there

  • Listen when people talk. Don't be thinking about what you're going to say

  • (as a writer) Seek to understand people when you observe them not to judge them as being right or wrong

  • Make your writing 3 dimensional ie. Show both sides of the story

  • Distrust adjectives

  • Remember to get the weather in your damned book.

  • Make the punctuation as conventional as possible

  • Don't use a dictionary to write

  • Read the dictionary at least 3 times from begging to end. Then loan it to someone who needs it

  • Always stop [writing] when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. A: if you do that ever day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck

  • Stop writing when there is still something in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that feed it

  • Learn not to worry about what you will write next or how the book will come together. As soon as you start to think about it stop it. Thank about something else

  • After you finish writing for the day, read something else and stop thinking about what you're writing. (you will lose the thing you are writing before if you keep thinking about it)

  • After you've finished writing for the day get exercise, make love with whom you love

  • At the beginning of the writing period of the day, read everything you wrote the day before until you get to where you stopped. *when it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters every day to where you left off

  • Don't read anything before you write (do it at the end of the day)

  • Don't show your writing to anyone if it isn't finished

  • Don't talk to other people about what you're writing if it is unfinished

  • Don't tell others about how good your writing is A: Even if its true, you'll feel like a shit

  • Write standing up

  • For beginning writer, use a type writer

  • For an experienced writer, write in pencil, then type it out

  • Write in a natural environment, not an air conditioned room or an airplane

  • Ease off making love when writing hard (the two things are run by the same motor)

  • Work everyday till your so pooped about all the exercise you can face is reading the papers. Then eat, play tennis or swim or something in a work daze just to keep your bowels moving and the next day write again.

  • When writing tell everyone you're in one hotel and then live in another. When they locate you, move to the country.

  • Don't just reach the level of success where you're good compared to your broke friends

  • Don't drink before or while you're writing

  • (for writers) work alone and only see other writer's after your work is done and not too often then

  • When writing a novel create living people, not characters

  • Never use slang words when writing except in dialogue and then only when unavoidable

  • Only use swear words that have lasted at least a thousand years

  • See if you can make the effect without using the word

  • Never use a word without first considering if it is replaceable

  • Never use words which shock altogether out of their own value or connotation (eg. 'Fart' would stand out on a page unless the whole page was Rabelaisian.)

  • Learn writing from everyone who has written who has something to teach you

  • Either write what hasn't been written before or beat the dead authors at what they have done

  • Write about the people you know, love and hate, not the people you study about

  • Don't concern yourself about writing a book about what is in fashion now

  • Don't write when there is nothing to say or not water in the well

  • Put the shit you write in the wastebasket (don't publish it because there is pressure to publish it for money)

  • Don't read the reviews of your book A: when the don't understand it you get angry; if they do understand it you only read what you already know and it is no good for you.

  • Be prepared to work always without applause

Big Ideas

  • The best training for a writer is an unhappy childhood

  • Taking a lot of punishment/pain causes people to be funny

  • If what you're writing is good you will know

  • You will feel like shit if you talk about how good your work is

  • Summer's a discouraging time to work- You don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall when the boys really put pen to paper.

  • It doesn't matter who you are, where you come from etc etc. All that matters is whether or not you can write

  • Writing as a painful process

  • Writers are excited about the thing they are currently writing, by the time it is finished and out for the public to read they are sick of talking and thinking about it

  • The energy to write and the energy to have sex are connected