Writing lessons from Ernest Hemingway (featuring adverbs and punching)
Hemingway's prose is shaped on brevity and sweetened with metaphor.
How to write like Hemingway
Start with the simplest sentence possible. Hemingway said to “write the truest sentence you know”. This may sound too abstract. Instead, start with the simplest sentence possible. This paragraph begins exactly so.
Make the thesaurus your friend, watch and read media written in a pulp style. Learn new evocative words, so you may say more in a shorter space.
Focus on realist mood, words, and sentences. Write with a conversational style devoid of fluff, but peppered with evocative prose. Realism cannot always be applied to every genre. Hemingway achieved realism with a grounded prose built on brevity and matter-of-fact journalistic style.
Read style guides for fiction and journalism. Break the rules where necessary.
Live an eventful life. Easier said than done. At the least, get into a few fights. Punchy experience breeds punchy writing.
Adapt. When writing fantasy or magic realism, find the right words, not the simplest ones.
Pepper your realism with symbolism. Start with basic metaphors about how the weather mirrors feelings or events.
Read Hemingway and authors like him. But don't drink as much as he did.
Realism built on brevity
Hemingway was the essential precursor to modern and post-modern writing, with its obsession for simplification. He may have built his brevity on his life and journalistic adventures. Whether he mused poetically, or he aimed for the point, brevity is his writing's core feature.
Hemingway's prose itself is one of the best examples of concise, short and sweet writing. Many contemporary authors try to replicate his style, though without understanding Hemingway’s experience, they may only be weaker copies.
Realism, in style and plot, defines Hemingway and made him a classic. But symbolism and metaphor are always nearby, more or less obvious, supplanting what may sometimes be a clinical description of events and emotions. If Hemingway’s writing and dialogue may sometimes be too functional and lack sweetness, symbolism is the honey to make it memorable.
Many stories may seem bland otherwise, such as Hills like white elephants. But when we glimpse the meaning behind the words and landscape, the story transcends the simple premise to become a vignette of emotional strength.
Regardless of brevity, simplicity, and how functional creative prose should be, Hemingway respects a core tenet of writing: use the right word at the right moment.
Realism may need simplicity and a style shaped on journalistic prose. Other genres have their own needs - to immerse yourself and the reader, do not simplify for the sake of simplicity, but to sustain brevity and understanding.
Common is as common writes
Common everyday words will support brevity best when writing realism. This too may be a matter of preference, though every style calls for adaptation.
For other genres - magic realism, surrealism, fantasy - common words may not be enough to convey a true magical mood because of their failure to evoke feeling.
Regardless of famous writers or modern trends, remember that good writing thrives on finding the right word at the right moment. Not the most complicated, not the simplest.
Fear not to tell, use dialogue and thought cues
A snappy amount of advice says Hemingway only did showing not telling. But the truth stands about halfway, because Hemingway wrote a fair amount of telling embedded in the showing.
Showing is better because it helps place the reader in a more active role, as an observer of events. We’re not delivering cold information to readers, we’re letting them draw their own conclusion from dialogue, action, mood, and symbols.
Hemingway does well to not over-explain when showing, to let the reader decide the feeling. Otherwise, he uses standard methods for making an impression: straight-up telling how a character feels, and giving information through dialogue and thinking cues.
Sometimes the telling may be too much. In The Old Man and the Sea, the protagonist will declare a lot of info in monologue form. The method is naturalist, if roughshod.
Maybe more important, it is effective. Hemingway may have intervened with his own voice, but he let the old man do the talking.
No irrational fear of adverbs
Reading advice from various writers, famous or not, may make one think that adverbs are the devils of language. Stephen King has gleefully said a now-famous quote about the devilry of adverbs. Of course, reading his books, he doesn't seem particularly fond of the quote.
Hemingway was perfectly clear about adverbs, and made no fuss: use adverbs when you need to, avoid them when you don't. His relationship with adverbs was healthy, unlike his relationships with some of the women in his life.
Adverbs may be needed as evocative words, to convey feeling or impression without writing longer phrases. Adverbs are not the devil, but sometimes necessary beautiful embellishments. Understand them, cherish them, and they will be faithful companions.
Punchy experience breeds punchy prose
Hemingway was a man of action, traveling, fighting wars, hitting people occasionally, and writing about real life.
Writers may be a lazy kind, often stuck to their creaky chairs hoping they'd write the Great Modern Novel. No surprise that Hemingway tended to write realism, though harsh experience will not always conjure a love for realism - see Tolkien and others.
The essential lesson stands: go outside, breathe fresh air, travel, meet interesting people, see inspiring places, punch someone when they criticize your writing. Then return to your desk and write stories imbued with new inspiration.
The importance of being Ernest
If one could have a conversation with Hemingway, I bed he’d insist on the importance of developing your own style.
Hemingway himself was a considerable break-up from past, more convoluted writing in mainstream literature. His poignant style may be a result of life experience, but also a sign of the times.
Life in human society seems to go ever faster, a fact valid a hundred years ago as today. Hemingway’s writing is part of the natural order of things. An order which sometimes calls for more brevity and fewer embellishments.
Part of Hemingway’s charm is that he wasn’t content with copying the style of other writers. He heralded a new attitude in literature through experience and love of writing.
His style is too simplistic at times. But a considerable amount of work may be needed to distill writing to its most poignant impression, and sweeten it with metaphor.
For being so simple at first glance, the style is great at conveying a real sense of place. We get a documentary-inspired feeling of being there, witnessing the events as if reading them in the newspaper.
Hemingway is at his best when writing realism infused with poetic meanderings and metaphor, such as The Old Man and the Sea. His style is not the only way to accomplish powerful writing, thankfully. But Hemingway has done Hemingway best.