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    Ernest Hemingway on Writing
    Ernest Hemingway on Writing
    Ernest Hemingway on Writing
    Ebook122 pages1 hour

    Ernest Hemingway on Writing

    By Larry W. Phillips

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    About this ebook

    A collection of reflections on writing and the nature of the writer from one the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

    Throughout Hemingway’s career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing—that it takes off “whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.”

    Despite this belief, by the end of his life he had done just what he intended not to do. In his novels and stories, in letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned articles on the subject, Hemingway wrote often about writing. And he wrote as well and as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived…

    This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself.

    —From the Preface by Larry W. Phillips
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateJul 25, 2002
    ISBN9780743237369

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    Reviews for Ernest Hemingway on Writing

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    • 4/5
      A good read. Funny?
    • 3/5
      Phillips puts together a collection of quotes from Hemingway's work and also from a number of letters and interviews. I am not sure Hemingway would have been happy about this book, although Mr Hemingway's fourth wife Mary Welsh Hemingway gave the editor (Phillips) permission to use the various quotes from Hemingway's major works. Phillips' major contribution is putting together Hemingway's thoughts on writing in one convenient place. Other than that, it smacks of someone getting to publish a book simply because the subject is famous. It is a very quick read and I enjoyed reading it, but I was a little disappointed that it is just a series of quotes organised thematically. Worth a read, worth keeping to refer back to, but reading about Hemingway just isn't the same as reading Hemingway.
    • 5/5
      Great for the Hemingway casual fan aspiring writer who doesn't have time to devote to his letters and other scrumptious details of Papa. Absolutely loved it!
    • 4/5
      An interesting read for a (wannabe) writer and Hemingway fans.
    • 5/5
      I've read just twenty pages, however I've never seen anything so true about writing.
    • 4/5
      "Writing is easy; you just open a vein and bleed."There's no evidence that Hemingway ever said this, or anything much like it. He wasn't given much to ironic statements that mean to say the opposite of their literal meaning, and he was quick to assert that serious writing is hard work indeed. From the time he was a young man, Hemingway's driving ambition was to be the best American prose writer of his generation, and he didn't take his task casually. Whatever you think of Hemingway as a human being—and I find I like him more the more I learn about him as opposed to his myth—he took his work much more seriously than he took himself.This collection picks what Hemingway wrote or said about writing and the writing life, in his personal letters, in interviews, and in works such as A Moveable Feast and The Green Hills of Africa. As the editor notes, quotes dating from the early 1920s to the late 1950s, even taken out of context and mashed together regardless of chronology, paint a consistent picture: Hemingway's ideas about writing didn't change significantly between youth and old age. And they're worth listening to by any aspiring writer. The quotations are grouped into thirteen chapters by subject, including "What Writing Is and Does," "The Pain and Pleasure of Writing," "Working Habits," "Characters," "Knowing What to Leave Out" and "The Writer's Life." Although most quotations don't run more than a paragraph and many are just one or two sentences, I found the collection easy to read straight through and worth keeping on the shelf.
    • 2/5
      Hemingway lived to write. His eventual failing as a writer—his inability to actually write—is one of the several reasons that led to his suicide in 1961. What he did write for the most part and for much of his life was superior and often innovative seen even from the perspective of the twenty-first century. It was not merely that Hemingway was a gifted writer but he also had a profound impact on a generation of writers who cut their teeth in imitation of or in reaction to his works.

      In spite of that impact, Hemingway was not often open to discussing the mechanics of his art. In an effort to correct that apparent deficiency, Larry Phillips, the editor of On Writing, collected from Hemingway’s writings—from his novels, letters, and interviews—fragments where, over the years, Hemingway did broach what might be viewed as his theories of art in general and his own ideas about writing in particular. There are chapters that collect Hemmingway’s thoughts and counsels about a variety of topics related to his wiring and to the creative process. Among them:

      What Writing Is and Does
      The Qualities of a Writer
      The Pain and Pleasures of Writing
      What to Write About
      Advice to Writers
      Working Habits
      Knowing What to Leave Out
      Obscenity
      Titles
      Politics
      The Writer’s Life

      The thin volume, given its objective, does have some value. Although the fragments reveal little about the Hemingway style that is not spelled out in his major novels, published letters and secondary studies, it does collect in one place some of what is scattered. Phillips includes for example, his 1949 note to Charles Scribner: “A writer, of course, has to make up stories for them to be rounded and not flat like photographs. But he makes them up put of what he knows.” [p.21] And he also includes the section in “Death in the Afternoon” where he talks about the “Iceberg Theory”:

      If a writer of prose knows enough about 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. [p.177]

      But is seems to me that the greatest utility of the volume is that it continues to milk the Hemingway name, raising additional money for Hemingway’s heirs, publisher and managers.
    • 5/5
      Great, wonderful book. This isn't anything but a collection of wisdoms from Hemingway, but if you're interested in how he looked at writing (and if you want to write yourself) this is a goldmine not to be underestimated. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      One hundred and forty pages of sage advice to budding writers from one of the best of all writers. There is something here for everyone who writes from necessity. Those who write for pleasure may find it less useful -- even abusive -- for it is indeed as Papa said: "If any son of a bitch could write, he wouldn't have to teach college English."There's a lot more where that one came from. Read this book if you've got the nerve. Keep it by the keyboard for those days when you need a little help.Highly recommended to a certain group of people. Only four-and-a-half stars because it needs an index.
    • 5/5
      Five stars means the book couldn't be better, and is not often given as a rating. In this case, I believe Phillips did an outstanding job in researching Papa's comments and do not believe much could be added.
    • 2/5
      Don't buy this book. He doesn't have much to say. The editor had to make a few stretches to even get this to book-size.

    Book preview

    Ernest Hemingway on Writing - Larry W. Phillips

    The Hemingway eBook Collection

    Across the River and into the Trees

    By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

    The Dangerous Summer

    Dateline: Toronto

    Death in the Afternoon

    A Farewell to Arms

    The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War

    For Whom the Bell Tolls

    The Garden of Eden

    Green Hills of Africa

    In Our Time

    Islands in the Stream

    Men Without Women

    A Moveable Feast

    The Old Man and the Sea

    The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

    The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

    The Sun Also Rises

    To Have and Have Not

    The Torrents of Spring

    True at First Light

    Winner Take Nothing

    Ernest Hemingway on Writing

    log

    TOUCHSTONE

    Rockefeller Center

    1230 Avenue of the Americas

    New York, NY 10020

    Copyright © 1984 by Larry W. Phillips and Mary Welsh Hemingway

    All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

    First Scribner ebook edition 2002

    All inquiries about print and electronic permissions (use of excerpts) for books and other works by Ernest Hemingway can be sent by email to:

    hemingwaypermissions@simonsandschuster.com, or by regular mail to Simon & Schuster, Inc., Permissions Dept., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020, or by fax to (212) 698-7284.

    Visit www.simonsays.com/hemingway for additional information about Ernest Hemingway.

    ISBN 0-7432-3736-6

    This book is dedicated to my Mother and Father; to Mr. Edwin Benish; and to Charles (Pete) Redfield of the Silver Coach.

    Acknowledgments

    The editor and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission to reprint granted by the following authors and publishers:

    Mary Welsh Hemingway, for A Moveable Feast; By-Line: Ernest Hemingway; Death in the Afternoon; Green Hills of Africa; The Nick Adams Stories; Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters; Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech; and one unpublished manuscript. All quotations from the works of Ernest Hemingway are fully protected by copyright and are used by permission.

    Mary Hemingway and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for How It Was by Mary Welsh Hemingway. Copyright © 1951, 1956, 1963, 1965, 1976 by Mary Welsh Hemingway.

    George Plimpton, for An Interview with Ernest Hemingway from The Paris Review 18 (Spring 1958).

    Contents

    Foreword by Charles Scribner, Jr.

    Preface

    1. What Writing is and Does

    2. The Qualities of a Writer

    3. The Pain and Pleasure of Writing

    4. What to Write About

    5. Advice to Writers

    6. Working Habits

    7. Characters

    8. Knowing What to Leave Out

    9. Obscenity

    10. Titles

    11. Other Writers

    12. Politics

    13. The Writer’s Life

    Foreword

    Ernest Hemingway’s public image as war correspondent, big-game hunter, and deep-sea fisherman has tended to obscure his lifelong dedication to the art of writing. Only those who knew him well realized the extent of that commitment. To Hemingway, every other pursuit, however appealing, took second place to his career as a writer. Underneath his well-known braggadocio, he remained an artist wholly committed to the craft. At some times he showed an almost superstitious reluctance to talk about writing, seeming fearful that saying too much might have an inhibiting effect on his muse.

    But at other times, when he was not caught up in the difficulties of a new work, he was willing to converse freely about theories on the art of writing, and even his own writing methods. He did this often enough in his letters and other writings to make it possible to assemble this little book.

    For readers of Hemingway who would like to know more about his aims and principles as a writer, this collection of his views will provide an interesting sidelight on his books. For aspiring writers who are looking for practical advice on the demanding task of putting words together, these pages will be a gold mine of observations, suggestions, and tricks of the trade.

    As Hemingway’s publisher and friend, I think it would have pleased him to know that some of the things he learned about literary creation were being shared with writers of another generation. I’m sure he would have come out with some wry or disparaging remark about his own work, but down deep I think he would have been grateful to Larry Phillips for collecting his views on writing in this useful and interesting way.

    CHARLES SCRIBNER, JR.

    Preface

    Throughout Ernest Hemingway’s career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing—that it takes off whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.

    Despite this belief, by the end of his life he had done just what he intended not to do. In his novels and stories, in letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned articles on the subject, Hemingway wrote often about writing. And he wrote as well and as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived. His comments and observations on the craft accumulated over his lifetime into a substantial body of work—comments which are, for the most part, easy to excerpt from the text surrounding them.

    The process which led to this collection began several years ago, and had its start, as perhaps all such books have their start, with my admiration for the author and his writing, and with my own search for the rules of writing. The idea was originally inspired by Thomas H. Moore, who did a similar book on Henry Miller, noting as he went passages which touched on the subject of writing, and collecting them.

    Collecting the opinions of one man on a given subject, as expressed throughout a lifetime, proved to be an interesting exercise. As with anyone’s thoughts on a given subject, Hemingway’s on writing were scattered, so to speak, to the four corners of his world. As I brought them together again, and assembled them into different categories, something unusual happened. Comments apparently made at random, at different times, often decades apart, and in different cities or countries, magically began to fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

    This is perhaps similar to the effect known to transcribers of taped interviews in which a person will sometimes leave a subject in mid-sentence, go on to talk about something else for a time, then resume again the original thought, taking up at the precise point where he left off. When Hemingway’s isolated comments on the subject of writing were taken out of widely diverse articles, letters, and books, they locked together like some message issued over the years, dictated between the lines of other material. I have attempted here to preserve some of that feeling.

    This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work

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