Write Like Hemingway: Writing Lessons You Can Learn from the Master
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In this book, writers learn to write like they were born that way from one of America’s greatest literary geniuses—Ernest Hemingway. Noted writing teacher Dr. R. Andrew Wilson calls writers to an adventure in writing Hemingway himself would love. Along the way they discover what really makes him a Great Writer, and how they can apply those lessons in voice, character, setting, and more to enhance their own writing. Whether agonizing over style, perfecting prose, or puzzling out plot, student writers find the answers they need to write their own masterworks. They’ll also benefit from Papa’s advice to beginning writers, comments on the work of other great authors, and daily writing habits. In this enlightening and informative book, writers find the mentor they need to master the art of writing.
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Write Like Hemingway - R. Andrew Wilson
WRITING LESSONS
YOU CAN LEARN
FROM THE MASTER
write like
Hemingway
R. ANDREW WILSON, PHD
9781598698961_0002_001Copyright © 2009 Simon and Schuster
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
Published by
Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322. U.S.A.
www.adamsmedia.com
ISBN-10: 1-59869-896-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-59869-896-1
eISBN: 978-1-44051-415-9
Printed in the United States of America.
J I H G F E D C B A
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available from the publisher.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.
—From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the
American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and
Associations
This book is available at quantity discounts for bulk purchases.
For information, please call 1-800-289-0963.
The published works of Ernest Hemingway are protected fully by United States and International Copyright Law. Grateful acknowledgment is given for the permission to reprint:
Excerpts from By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, edited by William White: Copyright 1933, 1934 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright renewed © 1961, 1962 by Mary Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Excerpts from Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway: Copyright 1932 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1960 by Ernest Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Excerpts from Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, edited by Carlos Baker: Copyright © 1981 by The Ernest Hemingway Foundation, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Excerpt from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway: Copyright 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1957 by Ernest Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Excerpt from For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway: Copyright 1940 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright renewed © 1968 by Mary Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Excerpts from Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway: Copyright 1935 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1963 by Mary Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Excerpts from Interview with Ernest Hemingway from The Art of Fiction No. 21
by George Plimpton, The Paris Review, Issue 18, Spring 1958: Copyright © 1958 by The Paris Review. Reprinted with permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Excerpts from A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway: Copyright © 1964 by Mary Hemingway. Copyright renewed © 1992 by John H. Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, and Gregory Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Excerpts from On Writing
from The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway: Copyright © 1972 by The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Excerpts from The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway: Copyright 1925, 1927, 1930, 1933 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed 1953, 1955, © 1958, 1961 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright 1927, 1932, 1933 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright renewed 1955, © 1960, 1961 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright 1933 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed © 1961 by Mary Hemingway. Copyright 1933, 1936, 1938 by Ernest Hemingway. Copyright renewed © 1961, 1964, 1966 by Mary Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon &Schuster, Inc.
Excerpts from The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway: Copyright 1926 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright renewed 1954 by Ernest Hemingway. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Dedication
For Jennifer
Acknowledgments
This book presumes that any act of writing is strongly influenced by both the people around an author and the models to whom he looks for guidance. I’m grateful first of all to Ernest Miller Hemingway. Without Papa’s dedication to the writing craft and his inestimable talents, generations of writers would be lesser than they are. Jennifer Kushnier, my wife, encouraged me early on, critiqued a first draft, and offered thoughtful feedback throughout the writing process. The folks at Adams Media proved invaluable at making this book a reality—especially Paula Munier, who proposed the initial idea; Wendy Simard, my editor; Matthew Glazer; Richard Wallace, Colleen Cunnigham, and Michelle Kelly. Mitchell A. Smolow provided sound legal advice and is a good friend to have amidst a whitewater rapid. T. Kenneth Wilson was an early mentor who helped me appreciate the art of a Hemingway sentence.
Contents
Preface: Papa Hemingway, Writer of the World
1: The Education of Ernest Hemingway:
How a Nobel Laureate Learned to Write
2: A Lean, Well-Honed Style:
Writing Through Papa’s Voice
3: An Immovable Life:
The Forging of a Character
4: Dialogue:
Or, Having Your Characters Do Things with Words
5: The Green Hills of Hemingway:
Setting and Description
6: For Whom the Story’s Told:
Plotted Fictions
Conclusion
Notes
Papa Hemingway,
Writer of the World
Preface
I can’t think of any other in history who directly influenced so many writers. Especially young writers.
(John O’Hara on Hemingway’s legacy, New York Times, 3 July 1961)
Sitting atop a peak in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range shows you just how flawed human eyesight can be. From the mountain’s base, its sides seem to ascend in elegant slabs. At the summit, however, you see the rocky shoulders for what they are: piles of stacked rubble. Each rock comes at blunted, odd points. Each boulder’s skin is calloused, coarse. They hold the centuries of wear from White Mountain winters. Finding your balance is difficult. Sitting is uncomfortable.
I realize that I was seeing this mountainscape in the way that Ernest Hemingway taught me. Not as a grand, sweeping picture, but as piece built upon piece. Rock upon rock. Sensation upon sensation. I think of the opening of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan lying along a mountainside and watching the dark road that he’s to block the Fascists from taking.
Looking out across a forested ravine, I see the Mount Washington Auto Road in the distance. Its black surface shines in the morning sunlight. Lone clouds had passed through earlier, sprinkling the ridges. The Auto Road isn’t busy just yet, but by afternoon trains of tourists will follow it to the summit. They’ll park their cars, get out, enjoy the view. Enjoy lunch. They’ll come down with a bumper sticker.
That view is worth taking in. These sights are why I bother using a different route up. The climb by foot, backpack weighing on your shoulders, forces you to slow down. Unhurried by traffic, you take in each tree. Each rock. Each animal. It’s the way one of Hemingway’s sentences forces you to slow down. Take in the details. Hemingway may not have been on this peak, but his way of seeing the world has.
On my way back down that day, I’m near the end of the Six Husbands Trail. One of the steepest ways down from the summit, the trail is also one of the most direct routes up. Where the trail levels off in the Great Gulf, I’m surprised by a woman standing in the middle of the path.
How much further is the summit?
she asks.
I cock my head, unsure if she’s joking. Far enough.
She’s with a bearded man. Both wear matching hip-packs. Slung from their waists, each has a pair of plastic water bottles, the kind you get free with a bicycle.
Do you think we have time to make it up and back?
The man pulls a handkerchief from his pack. He wipes it across his brow.
I don’t know,
I say. It’s kinda late in the day.
The magazine said it could be done in a day.
Well, we should’ve left earlier.
And whose fault would that be?
Maybe we should stick to reading magazines.
Listening to their exchange, I’m not hearing this woman and man so much as I’m hearing characters out of Hemingway. The man and Jig in Hills Like White Elephants,
using idle chat about alcohol and hills to stave off what they’re trying to avoid discussing. The husband and wife in Out of Season,
quarreling over bad weather and fishing laws.
If Hemingway taught me something about how to see the landscape, he also taught me something about how to see people. And a fight over a drink that tastes like licorice or an ill-planned hiking trip suggests much more than the surface tells.
The idea of this book is to learn what we can about writing from Ernest Hemingway, the man who did more than any other American author to change the face of the English written word. He also changed the way we use literature to see the world that we inhabit.
We’re going to read Ernest Hemingway deliberately, both the stories that he created and the life that enabled his craft. We’ll begin by following Hemingway over the years that he learned to write: the boy who started as a journeyman reporter, the teenager who went off to war but came back with experiences to put to ink, and the man whose matured writing style was manifest in The Sun Also Rises. From there, we’ll look at the essential techniques of storytelling as Papa
Hemingway used them: style and voice, character, dialogue, setting and description, and narration and point of view.
Write Like Hemingway is designed for both aspiring writers who are new to Papa and old-time aficionados. We’ll cover both the basics of story writing and the special techniques that made Hemingway’s style powerful enough to win him both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize.
To use this book, you’ll want to have your copy of Hemingway’s Complete Short Stories nearby, whether its pages are new or dog-eared. And if you’re inspired to open Papa’s novels along the way, by all means do so. In each chapter, you’ll find writing exercises that are inspired either from Hemingway’s stories or from the master’s advice to writers just starting out. These exercises will help you along—if you’re unhappy with an aspect of one, change it into something that will get you writing. You can learn a lot from watching a master of the craft at work, but in the end it’s only through practice that any apprentice learns the art.
Let us see what Papa has to teach us.
The Education of
Ernest Hemingway:
How a Nobel Laureate
Learned to Write
1
The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn.
(Ernest Hemingway, Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba
¹)
All writers, if they’re any good, are asked at some point, How did you do it?
Ernest Hemingway was asked that question often during his life. In answering it, he could play the gate-keeping critic, pointing out the flaws in the literature of other writers, particularly those he sensed as competitors. But he could also enjoy playing the accomplished wordsmith to other writers. When he imagined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s angered response to his criticisms of Tender is the Night, Hemingway exclaimed: Jesus it’s marvelous to tell other people how to write, live, die, etc.
²
The popular image of Hemingway today is the fully formed Papa.
Robust and jowly, his face framed by a distinctive white beard, we picture him on safari in the African plains or on a boat riding the Atlantic waves. Rifle or rod in hand, he’s ready to teach us to hunt, to fish. From Finca Vigía, his Cuban villa, he answers the phone to accept his Nobel Prize or corresponds with biographers chasing after his life’s story. At Sloppy Joe’s Bar, Papa’s old haunt in Key West, the entrants for the annual Hemingway Look-Alike Contest invariably look like this elder statesman of storytelling, the man as he appeared in his fifties.
The nickname Hemingway preferred later in life, Papa,
certainly plays into this image. It’s telling that Hemingway was going by that name while still in his twenties, as early as 1927.³ He was then a father, and his first son, John, was known throughout childhood as Bumby,
a play on baby.
But he was also then the author of The Sun Also Rises, the novel that established him as a writer of international note. As his publishing success continued, the nickname Papa
spread from family to friends. In Cuba, the baseball team he coached for his sons all took to calling him Papa Hemingway.
⁴ So did younger writers who looked to him for advice. By the time of his death, anyone casually reciting the name Papa
knew that it carried the legacy of the author from Illinois who changed how we thought about what literature could do.
Papa Says Hemingway allowed Marlene Deitrich to call him Ernest,
even though he preferred Papa.
Hemingway’s nickname for Deitrich? The Kraut.
⁵
As this father figure of modernist literature, Hemingway has been praised for doing more to change the style of American writing than any other author. His stories tell us something startling and unique about the modern experiences of war and love, money and religion. But as a paternal authority he has been criticized for his shortcomings—too much machismo and often patently sexist, prejudiced, and anti-Semitic.
Pulling back the curtain on Papa’s reputation, it’s important to remember that he wasn’t always such a literary force. Whatever literary genius Papa brought to his craft, it came after years of effort, revision, and learning from the writers around him. It’s important also to remember the young Hemingway: the Hemingway who playfully went by Hemingstein
as a teenager, who wrote tall tales back home that he was engaged to the film starlet Mae Marsh (whom he never met), or who first struggled to improve his writing and find a publisher.
Here, we’ll trace the path of how Hemingway learned to write, from his early days as a junior newspaper reporter to the author that legendary editor Maxwell Perkins would take on at Charles Scribner’s Sons. Perkins had brought a generation of younger writers to his company that included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. Eager to publish the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises, Perkins explained to Hemingway that he was astonished by the novel’s extraordinary range of experience and emotion
that united in a complete design.
⁶
How did Papa learn to write such a novel?
The Newspaper Trade: Lessons in Kansas City
With a cub reporter’s job waiting for him, Ernest Hemingway arrived in Kansas City at the age of eighteen to set about making his career as a writer.
In the spring, he had graduated from high school in Oak Park, Illinois, a middle-class suburb outside of Chicago. There, he published several fictional stories in the school’s literary journal, typically at his English teachers’ insistence. But the articles he also wrote for the school newspaper, Trapeze, provided the early experience for what became his first trade as a journalist. The subjects about which he wrote in the paper ranged from the debate club to the football team, and they often included satirical witticisms about his Oak Park High classmates. More than once, he published in the imitative style of Ring Lardner, occasionally adopting his name in the byline. The gesture was the sign of an aspiring writer, learning his craft, who styled himself after a fellow Midwesterner known for his Saturday Evening Post stories and Chicago journalism.
But in the fall of 1917 Hemingway was in Kansas City to make his own name as an author. With America’s recent entry in the Great War
and an eagerness for action, he might have joined the Army. His father, a successful physician, was against Hemingway going to war, and he had hopes that his son would continue a family tradition of attending Oberlin College. But Hemingway shirked his father’s expectations. He spent the summer of 1917 deciding upon his future. From June through September, he worked hard on his family’s Michigan farm and fished rainbow trout out of Walloon Lake. For a time he contemplated leaving for California, enrolling at the University of Illinois, or taking on a job at the Chicago Tribune.
Seeing his son intent upon becoming a man of the typewriter— and wanting to delay as long as possible his becoming a soldier of the trenches—Dr. Hemingway compromised with Ernest’s ambitions. The physician asked his brother, Alfred Tyler Hemingway, to inquire about getting the youth a starting position with the Kansas City Star.
Hemingway’s Uncle Tyler was a successful businessman, prospering in the lumber industry into which he had married. He was also Oberlin classmates with Henry Haskell, who was then the Star’s top editorialist. After Tyler wrote to his old classmate, he found that his nephew could start as a reporter in the fall. Hemingway arrived in Missouri on October 15, 1917, and began his stint as a paid writer three days later, accompanied by Tyler on his first-day’s interview. As an apprentice newsman, he earned $15 a week over the initial thirty days.
Decades later, Malcolm Cowley’s flawed A Portrait of Mister Papa,
appearing in Life magazine, would claim that Hemingway had talked his own way into the Kansas City Star by misrepresenting his age. By then, however, Cowley was caught in the myth of Hemingway’s self-determining machismo. His account was colored by the aura of a sharp-talking youth, right out of high school, cutting out his own career as he would his distinctive writing style.
In reality, Hemingway relied upon the help of family and friends more than once to advance his career and to find ways of dedicating himself to his craft. In addition to Uncle Tyler’s help, Ralph Connable, a Canadian executive for Woolworth stores, introduced him at the Toronto Star, which would publish more than twenty of Hemingway’s pieces in its