Hemingway's writing tips

In A Moveable Feast, reviewed here a couple of days ago, Ernest Hemingway makes a number of comments about the writing process, many of which have been helpful to other writers over the past half century. Here are a few of them:

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

This is the direct opposite of writer's block. It's that rare period when whatever one happens to be writing, whether a novel, an article or a letter home, really does seem to write itself. The writer cannot possibly put words down on paper or on a computer screen as quickly as they come to the mind. When this happens to me, not nearly often enough, I get frustrated because in my haste my fingers jumble the letters, creating gibberish and slowing the writing process all the more.

I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good it was until I read it over the next day.

Time gives a writer fresh eyes, a more objective perspective on the quality of the work. I'm not sure a day is really enough time, however. A week would be better. A month even better than that. Wait long enough to read what you have written and it will seem somewhat unfamiliar, almost as if it were written by someone else. You will be more likely to notice flaws, typos and unclear sentences you failed to notice when the writing was still new and you could easily confuse what you actually wrote with what you meant to write.

I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.

This may seem the opposite of what a writer wants to do. When we know whatever it is we want to say, we want to say it. And right now. But Hemingway is right. Getting started each day can be difficult, especially if you don't know what happens next. If you can stop one day knowing what happens next, you are likely to still remember that when you begin the next day. And once you have resumed writing, your mind will be in gear and you will find it easier to continue.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Hemingway here is still talking about getting started on a new day of writing, especially when beginning something new or when one has failed to stop at the right place the day before. What he means by "one true sentence" is open to debate, and perhaps it doesn't even matter. It is just necessary to write something, anything. The narrator of the Sebastian Faulks novel Where My Heart Used to Beat says at one point, "You can always tear up the piece of paper and throw it away, but if you don't begin, then nothing comes. You have to submit." That may be what Hemingway was saying. You have to prime the pump. Then the water will flow.

I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day.

This again seems counterintuitive, but Hemingway is talking about letting the subconscious do the work for you. This takes discipline, a word Hemingway uses later, but he found the practice useful. Others might put it differently: Don't take your work home with you.