Hemingway | On Writing
& His Iceberg Theory
of Writing
#onhisbirthdaytoday
Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway – American short story writer, novelist and journalist - is known the world over for his multifarious avatars – as a hunter, as a war correspondent, as a deep-sea fisherman, and yes... for his adventurous life-style as well!
But wait! there’s one more feather to his craft (cap) that hasn’t been much discussed!
And that’s his extraordinary commitment to his craft - the art of writing.
Underneath his well-known braggadocio, he remained an artist wholly committed to the craft.
Every other pursuit, however appealing, took second place to his career as a writer.
Some lovely excerpts from Hemingway on his passionate craft - Writing, on his birthday today!
Here goes -
What Writing Is & Does
When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you.
If you do this successfully enough you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too.
If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for which is to make the story so real beyond any reality that it will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory.
The Qualities of a Writer
A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the year book of a school for exceptional children than writing novels.
Qn: What is the best early training for a writer?
HEMINGWAY: An unhappy
childhood.
Qn: Can you recall an exact moment when you decided to become a writer?
HEMINGWAY: No, I always
wanted to be a writer.
There’s no rule on how it is to write.
Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
What to Write About
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.
But when you get the damned hurt use it - don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist - but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
Advice to Writers
I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things…
… sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made.
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think,
Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.
It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.
Well, most of us, lit-bees (literary beings) woulda sure known a lot about Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory of Writing.
There’s something so unique about an iceberg - to the craft of writing!
There’s always more hidden beneath the surface of the iceberg – what we call in the era of ‘theory’ – as the subtext!
And that’s exactly the principle that Hemingway followed so scrupulously throughout his artsy life!
If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them, says the legend on his theory!
Hemingway’s career as a journalist has surely helped the legend a great deal in sticking to his minimalist style in his writing, which trueproves the delightful dictum that -
not including everything actually makes a story stronger!
Lovely, ain’t it?
Acknowledgements
Larry W. Phillips. Ed. Ernest Hemingway on Writing. TOUCHSTONE Rockefeller Center, NY. 1984.
Image of Hemingway: thescriptlabdotcom
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