WRITE LIKE HEMINGWAY

Before Ernest Hemingway was a writer, he was a journalist. He retained the same journalistic style of writing even in his fiction. He used minimal of ornamental sentences and focused more on the activities of his characters that actually drove his plot. It made his sentences short and clear to understand, and the fast pace of each sentence was carried on to the last sentence of his work. This made the job of the reader easier. There is no ornamental explanation of plots or psychoanalysis of his characters. What the readers got was a pure simple story where characters act and react to each other: both physically and emotionally.

The simplicity of prose and honesty of plot was the essence of Earnest Hemingway writing. He did not try to explain anything to the reader. He simply told the story and let the reader guess the mind and psychology of the characters in the plot for himself. He later coined this style of writing as Iceberg Theory or Theory of omission. In this, only what is relevant is given to the reader and underlying emotion and psychology are left out for the reader’s guess work. He himself summarizes this theory as follows:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing

He prefers a straight and direct writing than an ornamental one. Therefore, the advice he gave to F. Scott Fitzgerald was:

“Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.”

Hemingway believed that honesty and knowledge of the writer makes a work interesting for the reader if presented in a simple precise and clear manner.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline

Ernest Hemingway believed that a story should move fast to its end with no chance of any repetition of plot or sentences. He himself was an excellent editor who focused on clarity and brevity of expression using as simple language as possible. The facts of the story are the only thing that moves the plot in Hemingway’s writing. Although simplicity mixed with brevity and clarity is the best style of writing, still it is most difficult to achieve. It needs constant practice and brutal honesty to throw your own work in the dustbin. To sum it up:

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

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