What was Ernest Hemingway's writing process and revision approach?

He drafted forward and cut backward, and the cutting is where the style came from. His rule for the next morning was to stop each day while he still knew what would happen next. Craig McDonald describes the practice behind the one true sentence: when nothing true would come, Hemingway dug down through his own scrollwork until a sentence took hold of him as authentic, and that became the start. Revision then removed what a reader could infer and strengthened what a reader had to witness. Two consequences transfer to your own desk. Cutting exposes structural problems instead of solving them, so a passage that goes unclear after a cut is telling you the underlying situation was thin. And a first draft has to be allowed to hold untrue sentences, or you will spend the whole night on sentence one.

How did Ernest Hemingway build depth into stories where little seems to happen?

He keeps one fact out and makes everything else depend on it. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is the cleanest case in the stories. A wounded buffalo comes out of the grass, Margot fires from the car, her husband dies of that shot, and whether she meant to hit him is left open on purpose. Everything else is specific: her money, the lion Macomber ran away from the day before, the night his wife spent in the guide's tent, the car the two of them shoot from. Depth comes out of the ratio. A fully furnished surface with a single hole in a load-bearing place, and a reader who spends the story pressing on it.

How can writers use the iceberg theory without confusing the reader?

Withhold the interpretation and keep the orientation. Orientation is cheap. Readers put up with not knowing what a scene means, and they stop reading when they cannot tell who is present, where they are and what they want in the next minute. The Old Man and the Sea gives you the proportion: the physical world is all on the page, and nothing in the book explains what an old man losing his fish is supposed to signify. Run a pass over your own draft with two marks, one for lines that establish the situation and one for lines that explain its meaning. Cut from the second set. If you marked almost nothing in the first set, you have found the actual problem.

Why does such plain writing feel so intense?

Because plainness is a constraint, and a constraint raises the value of every choice left. Elizabeth Strout splits the demand into three parts: a sentence has to be accurate inside the story's own world, it has to be true emotionally, and it must not carry one extra word. The third part is what produces the intensity. With the ornament gone, one word can hold weight it could not have held in a decorated sentence, which is how Berg finds the aimlessness of a whole generation in the word "pretty" and Strout finds a man's isolation in the word "the". None of this requires short sentences. It requires that no word sit idle.

What can writers learn from Ernest Hemingway's dialogue?

Write the conversation the people would have, not the one the plot wants. His characters talk past the subject, repeat themselves, ask about drinks, and the pressure shows up in the shape of the evasion rather than in a confession. One detail is worth more here than the general lesson. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he renders the Spanish of the guerrillas into an English of "thou" and formal, slightly archaic word order, a language that exists only on his page, built to carry the feel of the original. Mewshaw's point applies to your draft as well. The dialogue produces a sense of speech and it was invented, so handle your own as a made object with a job, not as a transcript.

How do you write like Ernest Hemingway without copying the surface?

Take the decisions and leave the mannerisms. Three habits transfer to any subject and any genre. Know the material well enough to spend it on what you leave out. Keep the physical record complete. Refuse to name the feeling the record already implies. Not one of the three has anything to do with sentence length. Vargas Llosa's frame is the one worth keeping here, that a style is strong only when it fits the matter it was built for, so a borrowed one will fit your matter by accident at best. Use his method on your own material and you will not sound like him, and that is the evidence you learned the right thing.

Fiction

Ernest HemingwayWriting Style

Born 7/21/1899 – Died 7/2/1961

Cut the emotion and keep the sensory fact. What a reader supplies is stronger than what you deleted.

Write like Ernest Hemingway

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Ernest Hemingway: voice, themes, and technique.

The iceberg passage is usually quoted for its first half. Here is that half, from Death in the Afternoon: "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." And here is how the same passage ends: "A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing." That second line is the one that costs money. What he describes is not a way of writing short. It is a way of spending knowledge on the part of the story you decide not to print.

The label on the paperbacks says tough and terse. Marc Dudley answers that by picking a page-long sentence out of Green Hills of Africa and calling it no less characteristic, and the long unpunctuated chains that open A Farewell to Arms make the same argument. He wrote long when the material asked for it. What holds across the work is the refusal to interpret, so a reader who wants to know what a scene means has to assemble it out of the physical record.

That trade is why he is worth studying and why he is so easy to copy badly. Leave out a thing you have decided and its weight stays in the room. Leave out a thing you have not decided, and the page goes soft in the exact spot where the pressure was supposed to be.

How to Write Like Ernest Hemingway

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Ernest Hemingway.

1
Start with one true sentence, then keep moving
The credo comes from A Moveable Feast: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." Craig McDonald describes what Hemingway did to get there, digging down through his own scrollwork until a sentence seized on him as authentic, and that sentence became the opening. Russell Banks explains why it works as a first move. One true sentence eliminates half the available alternatives, and the sentence after it is made by the one in front of it. Jennifer Haigh supplies the warning you need before you try this tonight. Taken strictly it will keep you on sentence one until morning, so draft through lines you know are wrong and come back for them with a knife.
2
Write down what you are leaving out
Before you prune a scene, write the omitted fact on a separate line, in one sentence, in the plainest words you own. If you cannot finish that sentence, you have found the difference between an iceberg and a hole. The fact stays out of the draft and beside it, as the thing every visible detail has to stay consistent with. Vargas Llosa's condition for the whole technique is that the silence has a definite influence on the explicit part of the story, which gives you a second test. Name the sentence on the page that changes because of what you removed. If no sentence changes, you did housekeeping.
3
Give the scene a job and a clock
The withheld material sits under a surface that stays completely legible. In "The Killers" you get the lunchroom, the hour, the two men in overcoats too tight for them, the order they place, the cook tied up in the kitchen. The why is missing and nothing else is missing. Copy that arrangement: name a physical task, put a limit on the time available, and let the concealed matter press up through the task. A scene with a job can afford a secret. A scene without one turns to fog the moment you start cutting, and then readers report being bored when what they mean is that they were lost.
4
Trade each abstract noun for a thing in the room
Search the draft for shame, grief, fear, rage and every other name for a feeling. Pam Houston's instruction to her students is to sink the pain into the physical world, because the abstraction does the reader's work for them and empties the page, while a concrete thing invites them to bring their own history to it. The last page of For Whom the Bell Tolls does this at full stretch. Robert Jordan lies behind a tree with a broken leg and a submachine gun, waiting for an officer to ride into range, and what the book gives you at the end is his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest. Not one word for what he feels about dying.
5
Read it aloud and re-cut for the ear
Mewshaw hears something close to biblical repetition in this prose, of words, of images, of sentence shapes, and says it is best judged out loud. Do that with one of your own paragraphs. Join a run of actions with "and", take out the commas, and listen for whether the sequence picks up the forward pull Banks describes or flattens into a list. Then stop the chain dead with a short sentence and hear what the stop does to the sentences behind it. Keep whichever version your ear prefers, even when the tidier version is the one you were taught to hand in.

Ernest Hemingway's Writing Style

Breakdown of Ernest Hemingway's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Two registers, and the famous one is the rarer. The first is a chain. In A Moveable Feast the cafe sentence runs "The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus" and keeps going without a comma, so that, as Russell Banks reads it, each thing is absorbed by the next and the reader takes in the whole terrace at once, the way a tracking shot does. Nothing is subordinate to anything. The chain of "and" declines to rank the leaves against the wind against the bus, which leaves the ranking to you. Then the second register lands on that flatness. Four words. A verdict. The alternation is the thing to practise, because either register on its own becomes a tic inside a page. A writer who takes only the short one has copied the half that depended on the other half.

Vocabulary Complexity

The words are ordinary. The load they carry is not, and that gap is where imitation usually fails. His nouns come out of the working world, boats and bottles and rooms, and the verbs stay ordinary enough to disappear. Elizabeth Strout stops on a definite article and shows what it does: a man who "would lie in the bed" is held separate from the thing he lies in, where "lie in bed" would have folded him into it. Scott Donaldson adds the motive that usually drops out of the quotation, which is that Hemingway aimed the iceberg passage at the popinjay, the writer who wants you to notice his education, so the plainness has a target and is not humility. One caution from Boris Vejdovsky is worth carrying around. Some of the flattest lines are weather and nothing more, and a reader who goes hunting symbols in "It was raining" is doing work the sentence did not ask for. Read the weather as weather.

Tone

Cold is the wrong word for it. The narrator keeps his voice level while the people in front of him lose things, and the level voice is the pressure. Michael Mewshaw names the method litotes, the old figure of saying less than the case, and the rule under it is that the writer sets the scene so precisely that the reader arrives at fear or loneliness without ever being handed the noun. "Out of Season" is the clean demonstration of that. Hemingway took the guide Peduzzi's suicide out of the story, and the cut holds because the humiliation that drives him to it stays on the page, drink by drink and snub by snub. Donaldson's judgement is that showing the death would have overdramatised the story. Restraint of that kind costs the character something, which is why it reads as dignity instead of indifference. What gets withheld from the reader is the interpretation, and only that.

Pacing

He runs a scene at the speed of the body in it. In The Old Man and the Sea the fight with the marlin advances through the things Santiago has to do about it: the line laid across his back, the left hand cramping shut, the raw place where the cord bites, the raw fish chewed because he has to eat something. Time passes at the rate of work. Nothing in the sequence gets summarised out of the way, which is why the days on the water read long. Then the sharks arrive, one and then more, and the tempo changes with no announcement at all, because the tasks have changed from taking to defending. The return is quick. A skeleton lashed alongside the skiff, a boy who sees the old man's hands and cries, and no paragraph explaining what any of it added up to. Pace here is a function of what the character has to attend to next, and that lever works in any genre on any material.

Dialogue Style

"Hills Like White Elephants" is the standard exhibit and it earns the position. A man and a girl drink at a station bar in Spain and negotiate an operation the story declines to name even once. What they discuss instead is the hills, the beaded curtain, the drinks, the bags at their feet. Andre Dubus III makes a point about that opening which explains why the evasion works: the place is the lungs of the scene, and without a real bar and a real train coming, the two of them would have nowhere to breathe and nothing to hide behind. Notice the tags. Elizabeth Strout points out that most of the speech in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" carries no tag at all and the reader still knows who is talking, because the two waiters want different things and their diction splits along that difference. Read either story out loud with somebody else and you will hear how much of the talk is two people managing each other.

Descriptive Approach

Count the repeated words on the first page of "In Another Country" and the method becomes visible. The fall is cold, the wind comes down from the mountains, the game hangs outside the shops with snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind in their tails. None of it is scenery. Each fact limits what the men can do next, which is the difference between a detail that works and one that decorates. David Lodge reads that pattern as a set of hooks that ties the season to death without the word death appearing anywhere, and he notices that Hemingway keeps writing "the hospital" in places where a pronoun or a synonym would be the tidier choice, because the hospital is the centre of these men's days. The chestnuts warm in a pocket carry a comparison to the promise of life that he declines to make out loud. His stated aim, in the thigh-bone passage of Death in the Afternoon, was to give the experience rather than depict it, and description is the place where that ambition either holds or quietly gives up.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Ernest Hemingway uses across their work.

Delete or defer

Two settings on the same instrument. A fact can go out of the story for good, which is Hemingway's habit, or it can be moved out of sequence and handed over later, which is what a mystery does with the murderer. Vargas Llosa keeps the permanent case and the deferred one apart because they ask different things of a reader. A deferred fact buys suspense and pays it back at the end. A deleted fact buys permanent participation, since the reader has to keep supplying the missing piece and can be wrong about it for life. Decide which one you are doing. Writers who cut without deciding produce the deferred version by accident and then feel obliged to explain everything in a last scene.

The neighbour sentence

A flat declarative takes its force from the line beside it. Gail Sinclair makes the point about a bare count of the dead, "only seven thousand died of it", which is inert on its own and terrible in position. This is the part imitators cannot lift, because the sentence they admired was not built to stand by itself. Tune them in pairs. That habit also explains a common disappointment, which is that a page of quotable lines usually reads worse than a page with two plain ones and a hinge between them.

Give the experience, not the report

The aim is stated in the thigh-bone passage of Death in the Afternoon. Writing should hand over the experience rather than describe it from outside, and the difference shows up in what you choose to record. A report gives you the conclusion the senses reached, so the room was frightening and the man was brave. The experience gives you the sequence a body goes through in the order it goes through it, which means you have to know that order, whether it comes from a bullring or a hospital corridor or a boat, at a level of detail no adjective can fake. This is the tool that keeps his omissions from reading as evasion.

Said, with no adverb

The tag stays invisible. A. Scott Berg reads the last line of The Sun Also Rises for its refusal of any adverb after "I said", a discipline Elmore Leonard later hardened into a rule about not reaching for a new verb every time somebody speaks. Jennifer Haigh gives you the diagnostic that makes this usable. When a line seems to need "bitterly" or "hesitantly" propped against it, the bones of the line are weak, and the adverb is covering for dialogue that has not earned its tone. Repair the line. Then the tag can go back to doing nothing, which is the whole of its job.

The gap as a bet on the reader

Every omission is a wager that somebody you will not meet does the work. Elizabeth Strout wants space between the sentences for a reader to enter with a story of their own, and Jennifer Haigh notices how much credit Hemingway extends, trusting us to figure it out. Craig Johnson calls him courageous for going out on ice that thin. The nerve here is technical and not a matter of temperament, because the only alternative to trusting a reader is the explanatory sentence, and the explanatory sentence releases the pressure you spent a whole scene building. Donaldson's word for the payoff is equivalency, reader and writer at the same level.

Carve the fragment out of the whole

You publish a piece of the story and imply the rest of it. Vargas Llosa puts a writer in front of a cube containing everything that could be told and hands him a chisel, and the hidden fact is one of the chisels. "Hills Like White Elephants" is a carving of exactly that kind: one wait at one station, two drinks, a train that has not come, and behind all of it a relationship with a history and a probable future the story declines to enter. The order of operations matters. Know the block first and then choose where to cut, because a writer who starts cutting in order to find out what the story is will take out a load-bearing wall.

Literary Devices Ernest Hemingway Uses

Literary devices that define Ernest Hemingway's style.

The hidden fact

The load-bearing information leaves the story and the rest of it is built to lean on the space. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes's wound is at no point stated. It arrives through a telling silence, through what he does not do and what other people step around, until the reader has effectively imposed the condition on the character. Vargas Llosa attaches a warning to the device. The silence cannot be arbitrary. It has to be felt as an absence and to exert a definite influence on the visible story, or what you have is not an iceberg but missing material, and readers will read that as carelessness rather than as depth.

The ambiguous "it"

Omission comes down to a single word. "It all took a long time" is how "Indian Camp" handles the caesarean the boy hears with his eyes shut, and "She had to have it but it frightened her" is how "Up in Michigan" handles an assault. Ross Tangedal and Kawai Strong Washburn treat the empty pronoun as the exactly right word, because the reader has to supply the referent and is inside the event the moment he does. The same pronoun carries the void of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place", where the old waiter knows that it all was nada. Test your own drafts by asking what the pronoun in your vaguest sentence is standing in for, and answer in writing. This one costs nothing to type and everything to earn, since an "it" with no decided fact behind it is only vagueness with better manners.

Repetition with one word changed

He repeats the word where school teaching demands a synonym, then alters one element and lets the alteration do the work. James Plath counts the word "shadow" four times inside one sentence about a kingfisher, which lets the shadow of the war sit in a fishing scene without being mentioned. Boris Vejdovsky hears the same move in "Cat in the Rain", where the phrase "in the rain" comes back until flat weather talk turns into something charged. Ross Tangedal finds the sharpest case at the close of "Up in Michigan", where a mist already described returns as a cold mist, and that one added adjective delivers the ending. The pattern has to be built before the variation can register.

Double-voiced reassurance

Charles Baxter finds this one in mint condition in Hemingway, where a stoic character quiets his own frightened self by heartily quieting somebody else. The dying man surrounded by attendants says, "Hey. I'm all right." Who is he talking to, if not himself? The line has been aimed at the wrong listener, and the reader hears the fear in it because of the misdirection rather than in spite of it. That is how a page of flat dialogue can carry panic with no access to anyone's interior. Baxter says it is easy to write once you can see it, on the condition that the character stays unaware of what he is doing.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Ernest Hemingway.

Chopping the sentences and calling it a style

The staccato is the exception in his work rather than the pattern. Suzanne del Gizzo cites a count of his sentences that puts the clipped ones among his memorable outliers, and she has the sharpest account of why the parodies fall flat, which is that the parodist is not working with the omitted thing. Take "Big Two-Hearted River". Those short flat sentences about the coffee and the tent and the grasshoppers carry the weight of what Nick declines to think about, and lifted out of that pressure the identical sentences are a camping manual. Sentence length is the visible residue of a decision made earlier, so make the decision first.

Cutting the parts you had not settled yet

Hemingway named this failure himself, and it is the one imitators reach first. Cut a fact you know and the reader feels its shape through the surrounding detail. Cut a question you were avoiding and you get a soft patch, which turns up in feedback as a reader who cannot say what the scene was about. The symptom is specific and worth learning. Readers rarely complain that a passage was too spare. They complain that they could not tell what mattered, and the fix is upstream of the prose, in whatever you had not yet decided about the people in the room.

Reading the flatness as coldness

Take the feeling words out of a draft in which the characters have nothing at risk and the result is not restraint. It is furniture. His characters are under load inside the scene itself, and the load is legible from the first paragraph. Harry lies on a cot in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" with a gangrenous leg, quarrelling with his wife about her money and his talent, going back over the stories he did not write, and the text keeps a plain ledger of that waste. Restraint means the narrator declines to summarise the loss. It does not mean the character has nothing to lose, and a scene with nothing to lose will read as sterile however clean the sentences are.

Copying the pose instead of the discipline

The hard-boiled voice is the easiest thing to take and the least useful. Mewshaw's observation cuts against the whole imitation project: the prose creates a sense of realism while the language itself is anything but realistic, invented rather than overheard. Michael Von Cannon's summary of what forty readers found when they examined the sentences one at a time is care, discipline and attention to the well-placed word. None of the three arrives on the page as attitude. Copy the toughness and you inherit a manner. Copy the discipline and you get the thing that made the manner possible, and you will probably end up sounding like somebody else, which is the evidence that it worked.

Books

Explore Ernest Hemingway's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Ernest Hemingway's writing style and techniques.

What was Ernest Hemingway's writing process and revision approach?: He drafted forward and cut backward, and the cutting is where the style came from. His rule for the next morning was to stop each day while he still knew what would happen next. Craig McDonald describes the practice behind the one true sentence: when nothing true would come, Hemingway dug down through his own scrollwork until a sentence took hold of him as authentic, and that became the start. Revision then removed what a reader could infer and strengthened what a reader had to witness. Two consequences transfer to your own desk. Cutting exposes structural problems instead of solving them, so a passage that goes unclear after a cut is telling you the underlying situation was thin. And a first draft has to be allowed to hold untrue sentences, or you will spend the whole night on sentence one.
How did Ernest Hemingway build depth into stories where little seems to happen?: He keeps one fact out and makes everything else depend on it. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is the cleanest case in the stories. A wounded buffalo comes out of the grass, Margot fires from the car, her husband dies of that shot, and whether she meant to hit him is left open on purpose. Everything else is specific: her money, the lion Macomber ran away from the day before, the night his wife spent in the guide's tent, the car the two of them shoot from. Depth comes out of the ratio. A fully furnished surface with a single hole in a load-bearing place, and a reader who spends the story pressing on it.
How can writers use the iceberg theory without confusing the reader?: Withhold the interpretation and keep the orientation. Orientation is cheap. Readers put up with not knowing what a scene means, and they stop reading when they cannot tell who is present, where they are and what they want in the next minute. The Old Man and the Sea gives you the proportion: the physical world is all on the page, and nothing in the book explains what an old man losing his fish is supposed to signify. Run a pass over your own draft with two marks, one for lines that establish the situation and one for lines that explain its meaning. Cut from the second set. If you marked almost nothing in the first set, you have found the actual problem.
Why does such plain writing feel so intense?: Because plainness is a constraint, and a constraint raises the value of every choice left. Elizabeth Strout splits the demand into three parts: a sentence has to be accurate inside the story's own world, it has to be true emotionally, and it must not carry one extra word. The third part is what produces the intensity. With the ornament gone, one word can hold weight it could not have held in a decorated sentence, which is how Berg finds the aimlessness of a whole generation in the word "pretty" and Strout finds a man's isolation in the word "the". None of this requires short sentences. It requires that no word sit idle.
What can writers learn from Ernest Hemingway's dialogue?: Write the conversation the people would have, not the one the plot wants. His characters talk past the subject, repeat themselves, ask about drinks, and the pressure shows up in the shape of the evasion rather than in a confession. One detail is worth more here than the general lesson. In For Whom the Bell Tolls he renders the Spanish of the guerrillas into an English of "thou" and formal, slightly archaic word order, a language that exists only on his page, built to carry the feel of the original. Mewshaw's point applies to your draft as well. The dialogue produces a sense of speech and it was invented, so handle your own as a made object with a job, not as a transcript.
How do you write like Ernest Hemingway without copying the surface?: Take the decisions and leave the mannerisms. Three habits transfer to any subject and any genre. Know the material well enough to spend it on what you leave out. Keep the physical record complete. Refuse to name the feeling the record already implies. Not one of the three has anything to do with sentence length. Vargas Llosa's frame is the one worth keeping here, that a style is strong only when it fits the matter it was built for, so a borrowed one will fit your matter by accident at best. Use his method on your own material and you will not sound like him, and that is the evidence you learned the right thing.

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