Part IThe Story
Oak Park and the Style Sheet
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous and churchgoing suburb just west of Chicago. He was the second of six children. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician. His mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a trained musician who gave voice and music lessons and made her reluctant son play the cello. The house held both a music studio and a medical office, and the boy grew up between two strong-willed parents whose expectations he spent much of his life resisting.
Summers were spent at Windemere, the family cottage on Walloon Lake near Petoskey, Michigan. There his father taught him to hunt, fish, and camp, and the woods and trout streams of northern Michigan became the first landscape of his fiction. At Oak Park and River Forest High School, where he studied from 1913 to 1917, he boxed, played football, swam, and got good grades in English. He also wrote for the school newspaper, the Trapeze, and the yearbook, the Tabula, often imitating the breezy sportswriters of the Chicago papers.
He did not go to college. With help from an uncle, he got a job as a cub reporter at The Kansas City Star in October 1917 and stayed about six months. The Star gave every new reporter a single long sheet of 110 rules governing its prose. The first paragraph told reporters to use short sentences, short first paragraphs, and vigorous English, and to be positive rather than negative. Other rules told them to cut every superfluous word and avoid extravagant adjectives. In 1940 Hemingway told an interviewer that those were the best rules he ever learned for the business of writing. Before he ever wrote a story, he had absorbed a professional discipline built for speed, clarity, and economy.
By the Numbers
Hemingway's Career in Figures
18His age when he was wounded on the Italian front in July 1918
88Stories he filed for the Toronto Star in his first 20 months in Paris
5,090Copies in the first printing of The Sun Also Rises, 1926
47Alternative endings to A Farewell to Arms preserved in his papers
5.3MCopies of Life sold in two days with The Old Man and the Sea, 1952
1954Year he received the Nobel Prize in Literature
Fossalta di Piave
Hemingway wanted to go to war, but the U.S. Army turned him down because of poor eyesight. In December 1917 he signed up with the American Red Cross as an ambulance driver. He sailed from New York in May 1918, passed through a Paris under German shelling, and reached the Italian front in June. On his first day in Milan he was sent to help recover bodies after a munitions factory exploded, an experience he later described in Death in the Afternoon.
On July 8, 1918, near Fossalta di Piave, he was bringing chocolate and cigarettes to Italian soldiers at the front when a mortar shell exploded nearby. He was badly wounded with shrapnel in both legs, yet he helped Italian soldiers to safety. Italy awarded him the Silver Medal of Military Valor. He was eighteen. He spent months recovering at the Red Cross hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with an American nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who was seven years older than he was.
He went home in January 1919 believing they would marry. In March she wrote to say she was engaged to an Italian officer. The biographer Jeffrey Meyers has argued that the rejection scarred him, and that in later relationships he tended to leave before he could be left. The war gave him a wound, a medal, an early sense of his own mortality, and the raw material for his best-known novel about love and war.
That September he went camping and fishing in Michigan's Upper Peninsula with friends. The trip became the basis for "Big Two-Hearted River," a story in which a young veteran, Nick Adams, goes fishing alone and never once mentions the war that is plainly on his mind.
The Apprentice in Paris
After the war Hemingway freelanced for the Toronto Star Weekly and moved to Chicago, where he met the novelist Sherwood Anderson. He also met Hadley Richardson, a St. Louis woman eight years older than he was. They married on September 3, 1921. Anderson persuaded them to go to Paris instead of Rome, arguing that it was cheap and full of interesting people, and gave them letters of introduction. That autumn Hemingway signed on as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, and the couple moved into a small walk-up at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter. He rented a separate room nearby to work in.
Paris gave him teachers. Gertrude Stein, the great patron of modernism, became his mentor and godmother to his first son. At her salon he met painters including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Juan Gris. Stein called the expatriates around her the "Lost Generation," a phrase Hemingway would make famous. Ezra Pound, fourteen years his senior, met him in 1922 at Sylvia Beach's bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and took him seriously as a talent. Pound had just finished editing T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and he introduced Hemingway to James Joyce.
Journalism paid the bills and kept him sharp. In his first twenty months in Paris he filed 88 stories for the Star, including coverage of the Greco-Turkish War and the burning of Smyrna. Then, in December 1922, came a disaster every writer dreads. Hadley, traveling to meet him in Switzerland, lost a suitcase at the Gare de Lyon that held nearly all of his fiction manuscripts. Only a couple of stories survived.
He started over. In 1923 a small Paris press published Three Stories and Ten Poems, and a slim volume of vignettes titled in our time followed. The couple went to Toronto for the birth of their son John, born October 10, 1923, but Hemingway disliked the city and wanted to write fiction rather than news. They returned to Paris in January 1924, and he helped Ford Madox Ford edit The Transatlantic Review, which published some of his early stories.
He later described how he got himself writing in those years, standing at the window and looking out over the roofs of Paris.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
The Theory of Omission
The central idea of Hemingway's craft took shape in these years. In 1923, after writing a story called "Out of Season," he decided to leave out its real ending, in which an old man hangs himself. His theory, as he later recalled it, was that you could omit anything if you knew what you were omitting, and the omitted part would make the story stronger.
He gave the idea its most famous image a decade later, in his 1932 book on bullfighting.
— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1932The 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.
The "iceberg theory" is often misread as a rule to cut words. Hemingway's point was about knowledge. The writer had to know the whole iceberg, including the history, the emotion, and the unspoken reason a character does something, and then show only the part that mattered. Leaving out what you do not understand produced emptiness. Leaving out what you understand deeply produced pressure beneath the surface that readers could feel. In "Big Two-Hearted River," the war never appears, and it is everywhere. The technique is close to a writer's form of via negativa: value created by what is deliberately removed.
The style that carried the theory was spare and declarative. Critics have counted a large majority of his sentences as simple sentences without subordinate clauses. He used "and" in place of commas to create momentum, repeated words for rhythm, and cut interior commentary. When In Our Time, his first American story collection, came out in 1925, reviewers praised it for reinvigorating the short story. Carlos Baker, his first major biographer, later wrote that the stories taught Hemingway how to get the most from the least.
The Sun Also Rises
In 1925 Hemingway met F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had just published The Great Gatsby. Hemingway read it, admired it, and decided his next book had to be a novel. Fitzgerald became a friend, a rival, and an advocate who pushed his own editor at Scribner's to take a look at the young writer.
That summer Hemingway, Hadley, and a group of expatriate friends went to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, where he had first seen bullfighting two years earlier. The trip was full of drinking and rivalry. A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday, July 21, he began drafting a novel based on it and finished the draft in about eight weeks. He revised it heavily that winter in Schruns, Austria.
Pauline Pfeiffer, a Vogue writer from a wealthy Arkansas family, urged him to sign with Charles Scribner's Sons. He did, and Scribner's published The Sun Also Rises in October 1926. The first printing was 5,090 copies at $2. Within two months it was in a second printing, and the novel about wounded veterans drifting between Paris cafés and Spanish bullrings made him the voice of a generation that had come out of the war disillusioned. His editor at Scribner's was Maxwell Perkins, who also edited Fitzgerald and later Thomas Wolfe, and Perkins remained his editor until his death in 1947.
Success came with a personal cost. Hemingway had begun an affair with Pauline, and Hadley asked for a separation after the summer of 1926. He gave Hadley the royalties from The Sun Also Rises. They divorced in January 1927, and he married Pauline that May. His story collection Men Without Women came out in October 1927.
Key West and the Rewritten Ending
In March 1928, with Pauline pregnant, the Hemingways left Paris for Key West, Florida, on the suggestion of the novelist John Dos Passos. Their son Patrick was born in June in Kansas City after a difficult delivery, which Hemingway reworked into the ending of his next novel. On December 6, 1928, while in New York, he learned that his father had shot himself. Hemingway was devastated.
He finished A Farewell to Arms in Key West. The novel, about an American ambulance officer and an English nurse in wartime Italy, drew on his wound and his romance with Agnes von Kurowsky but went well beyond them. Scribner's Magazine serialized it from May to October 1929, and the book came out on September 27, 1929, with a first printing of about 31,000 copies. The biographer James Mellow considered it the book that established Hemingway as a major American writer.
The ending gave him trouble. When George Plimpton later asked him about rewriting, he gave one of his best-known answers.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Review, 1958I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Asked what had stumped him, he said it was getting the words right. When scholars went through his papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, they found 47 alternative endings, and Scribner's published them in a 2012 edition. The count was off, but the claim behind it held up: the plain final page was the product of relentless revision.
The Public Man
The 1930s made Hemingway famous as a personality as well as a writer. He spent winters in Key West and summers in Wyoming. Pauline's uncle bought them a house in Key West, and a carriage house became his studio. In 1930 he broke his arm in a car accident in Montana and spent seven weeks in the hospital. In 1932 he published Death in the Afternoon, a long treatise on bullfighting. In 1933 he and Pauline went on a ten-week safari in Kenya and Tanganyika, which produced Green Hills of Africa (1935) and two of his finest stories, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." In Green Hills of Africa he made a famous claim that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn.
In 1934 he bought a fishing boat, the Pilar, and began deep-sea fishing in the Gulf Stream. The image of the bearded outdoorsman, the big-game hunter, the deep-sea fisherman, and the aficionado of the bullring grew into a public persona that magazines loved. It sold books and made him a celebrity. It also began to crowd the work, and critics received some of his 1930s books coolly. To Have and Have Not (1937) was his only novel of the decade.
The Spanish Civil War renewed his purpose. In February 1937 he sailed to cover the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance, traveling with the journalist Martha Gellhorn, whom he had met in Key West. He worked with the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens on the documentary The Spanish Earth, wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, in a besieged Madrid, and in 1938 rowed across the Ebro River when the last bridge was down during the final Republican stand.
In 1939 he moved to Cuba, first to the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana and then to Finca Vigía, a hilltop property about fifteen miles from the city. He began For Whom the Bell Tolls in March 1939 and finished it in July 1940. Published on October 21, 1940, with a first printing of 75,000 copies, it became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and sold half a million copies within months. After his divorce from Pauline, he married Martha Gellhorn on November 20, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The War Years
When the United States entered the Second World War, Hemingway refitted the Pilar to hunt German U-boats off Cuba and set up an amateur counterintelligence operation to watch Nazi sympathizers. Martha and his friends considered it little more than a diversion, and the FBI opened a file on him that eventually reached 124 pages. The marriage was falling apart. Martha wanted him in Europe as a correspondent. In 1944 he finally went, as a front-line correspondent for Collier's, the magazine she wrote for.
In London he met Mary Welsh, a Time correspondent, and asked her to marry him on their third meeting. A car accident left him with a head wound that took 57 stitches. On D-Day he was aboard a landing craft that came within sight of Omaha Beach, but correspondents were not allowed ashore. Later that summer he attached himself to the 22nd Infantry Regiment and gathered a band of French irregulars near Rambouillet, a role that led to a formal inquiry because correspondents were not supposed to lead troops. He was present at the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, though not, despite the legend, the first American into the city. He later reported on the brutal fighting in the Hürtgen Forest. In 1947 he received a Bronze Star.
He married Mary in 1946 and admitted that he had been out of business as a writer from 1942 to 1945. The postwar years were hard. His friends and mentors were dying: Fitzgerald in 1940, Joyce and Anderson in 1941, Stein in 1946, and Perkins in 1947. He suffered from headaches, high blood pressure, and the effects of repeated head injuries and heavy drinking. He started ambitious projects, including the manuscript that became The Garden of Eden, and could not finish them.
The Old Man and the Sea
In 1948, on a trip to Venice, Hemingway became infatuated with a nineteen-year-old Italian, Adriana Ivancich. The platonic relationship inspired Across the River and Into the Trees, published in 1950. It sold well, but critics savaged it, and many concluded that Hemingway was finished.
He answered with a short book. Between December 1950 and February 1951, writing about a thousand words a day, twice his usual pace, he wrote a story he had been carrying for years: an old Cuban fisherman named Santiago who hooks a giant marlin, fights it for days, and loses it to sharks. The manuscript ran about 26,500 words. He sent copies to his publisher and friends and held the book back for more than a year before deciding it should stand alone.
Life magazine published the entire novella in its September 1, 1952, issue, which sold a record 5.3 million copies in two days. Scribner's released the book a week later. He dedicated it to Charles Scribner and to the memory of Max Perkins. William Faulkner, his longtime rival, reviewed it warmly, and Hemingway's favorite response came from the art historian Bernard Berenson, who ranked it above Moby-Dick. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for months, and on May 4, 1953, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first of his career. The magazine deal was also a feat of distribution. In one weekend his story reached more readers than most novels do in a lifetime, and the book edition sold on the strength of it.
Two Crashes and a Nobel
In January 1954, during a second African trip, Hemingway and Mary survived two plane crashes on consecutive days. The first came on a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo, near Murchison Falls. The second came on the rescue plane, which caught fire on takeoff; Hemingway battered the door open with his head. When they reached Entebbe, newspapers around the world had already run his obituary. His injuries included a skull fracture, cracked discs, damage to his liver and kidney, and burns. The biographers agree that the crashes accelerated a physical decline from which he never recovered.
In October 1954 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently shown in The Old Man and the Sea, and for his influence on contemporary style. He told reporters that Carl Sandburg, Isak Dinesen, and Bernard Berenson deserved the prize, but he accepted it, and the prize money, gladly. The biographer James Mellow suggests Hemingway had long coveted the award and may have suspected that the worldwide obituaries after the crashes had helped the Swedish Academy decide. Too injured to travel to Stockholm, he sent a short speech to be read at the banquet.
— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize banquet speech, 1954Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing.
The speech was brief and unsentimental. It described the job as he saw it: solitary, daily, and unforgiving, with public stature often coming at the cost of the work itself.
Ketchum
In November 1956, at the Ritz in Paris, Hemingway was reminded of trunks he had stored there decades earlier. Inside were notebooks from his years in Paris. Back in Cuba he began shaping them into a memoir of his apprenticeship, the book that became A Moveable Feast. In 1959 he worked in a burst on several manuscripts at once, but a bullfighting assignment for Life grew out of control, and for the first time he could not organize his own writing. His friend A. E. Hotchner helped cut it down.
He bought a house outside Ketchum, Idaho, in 1959, and after Fidel Castro's government moved to nationalize foreign-owned property, he and Mary left Cuba for the last time on July 25, 1960. The Cuban government later expropriated Finca Vigía with about 5,000 of his books still in it. By late 1960 he was deeply depressed and convinced that he was being watched by the FBI. His doctor flew him to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he received electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment he told Hotchner had destroyed his memory, the raw material of his work. Medical records made public in 1991 showed he had also been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961. The neuropsychiatrist Andrew Farah has since argued that repeated concussions contributed to his decline.
In April 1961 Mary found him holding a shotgun. He returned to the Mayo Clinic for more treatment and came home to Ketchum on June 30, 1961. In the early morning of July 2, he shot himself. He was 61. Mary initially told the press it was an accident and later acknowledged that it was suicide. His father, his sister Ursula, and his brother Leicester also died by suicide.
The Legacy
Hemingway's work kept coming after he was gone. A Moveable Feast appeared in 1964, edited by Mary, and a restored edition by his grandson Seán Hemingway followed in 2009. Islands in the Stream came out in 1970, The Dangerous Summer in 1985, The Garden of Eden in 1986, and True at First Light in 1999. Mary gave his papers to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and scholars there founded the Hemingway Society in 1980.
His influence on prose is hard to overstate. Later writers either imitated his style or defined themselves against it. J. D. Salinger met and corresponded with him during the Second World War and acknowledged him as an influence. The Nazis burned his books in Berlin in 1933, and American schools have taught them for generations. The critical view has also grown more complicated. Recent scholars have examined the misogyny, antisemitism, and racial caricature in parts of his work, alongside its honesty about fear, guilt, and loss. The persona he built has proved as durable as the books, and it has sometimes obscured a man whom some biographers describe as more private and introverted than his public image.
What survives is a method. Know your material completely, show only what matters, revise until the words are right, and work every day. He fell short of his own standards many times. When he met them, he changed how the English language is written.
Part IIThe Playbook
Hemingway was a novelist, not an executive, but his career is a long case study in craft, discipline, distribution, and the cost of a public image. The principles below are drawn from how he trained, worked, published, and ultimately struggled. They apply to anyone whose work depends on clarity and on doing difficult things repeatedly.
The principles
- 1.Learn under a strict style guide.
- 2.Know the whole iceberg before you show the tip.
- 3.Start with one true sentence.
- 4.Stop while you still know what comes next.
- 5.Revise until the words are right.
- 6.Find mentors, then outgrow them.
- 7.Survive the loss of your work.
- 8.Write from what you have lived.
- 9.Answer a failure with the work.
- 10.Choose distribution that matches the work.
- 11.Guard the work from the persona.
Principle 1
Learn under a strict style guide.
Hemingway's style began with 110 rules on a single sheet at The Kansas City Star. Short sentences, short first paragraphs, vigorous English, and no superfluous words were requirements for a cub reporter on deadline, not artistic choices. He spent only six months there, but he credited those rules for the rest of his life.
Constraints imposed early become instincts later. A beginner who learns under strict rules develops a sense for waste that no amount of later reading can quite replace. The rules give deliberate practice a clear standard to practice against.
Tactic: Adopt a written style guide for your team's most important documents, with no more than a page of rules. Have new hires follow it strictly for their first six months before they earn the right to break it.
Principle 2
Know the whole iceberg before you show the tip.
Hemingway's theory of omission worked only because he knew what he was leaving out. He warned that leaving out things you do not know creates hollow places. The power of a spare story came from the mass of knowledge below the surface.
The same principle applies to any concise communication. A one-page strategy or a short pitch persuades when the author could answer any follow-up question for an hour. Brevity without depth reads as thin, and experienced readers can tell the difference.
Tactic: Before cutting a memo or presentation, write down the five questions a skeptical reader would ask. If you cannot answer each in detail, the document is not ready to be short.
Principle 3
Start with one true sentence.
When a story would not start, Hemingway told himself to write one true sentence, the truest he knew, and go on from there. If he caught himself writing elaborately, he cut the ornament and returned to the first plain declarative sentence.
The method is a cure for blocked starts and for inflated language. It forces the writer to name the one thing they are certain of, and it builds everything else on that foundation. Most unclear writing comes from starting with what sounds impressive instead of what is true.
Tactic: When you are stuck on a document, write a single sentence stating the most important fact you know about the subject. Make it the first line and build from there.
Principle 4
Stop while you still know what comes next.
Hemingway described always stopping his day's work when he knew what was going to happen next. That way he could be sure of starting again the following morning. He wrote early, often from first light, and treated each session as one link in a long chain.
This habit protects momentum. Finishing a session at a natural stopping point leaves the next day's start cold and difficult. Stopping in the middle of a thought that is still flowing leaves a warm entry point. It is a small routine with outsized effects over months of work.
Tactic: End your next deep-work session a few minutes early, mid-task, with a written note of the exact next step. Start the following session by doing that step before anything else.
Principle 5
Revise until the words are right.
Hemingway said he rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, and 47 endings survive in his papers. He described the problem simply as getting the words right. He rewrote each day's work from where he had stopped, then again in typescript, and again in proofs.
The plainness of his prose is the result of that revision, not a sign of haste. Simple work that looks effortless usually took the most effort. Teams that expect the first draft to be the final draft rarely produce anything that reads clearly.
Tactic: For your most important output this quarter, budget more time for revision than for the first draft. Review it at least once in a different format, such as printed or read aloud, where problems are easier to see.
Principle 6
Find mentors, then outgrow them.
In Paris, Hemingway learned from Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Ford Madox Ford, and he watched Fitzgerald's success closely. These relationships gave him introductions, criticism, and publishing opportunities he could not have won alone. He then pulled away from most of them, sometimes bitterly, as his own voice developed.
Mentorship is most valuable in the apprentice years, when the gap between taste and ability is widest. The goal is to absorb what a mentor knows, not to stay dependent on their approval. His break with Stein was harsh, but his instinct to develop his own style was sound.
Tactic: Identify two or three people whose work you want to learn from and seek specific criticism from them. Each year, write down one way you now disagree with each of them.
Principle 7
Survive the loss of your work.
In December 1922 Hadley lost a suitcase at the Gare de Lyon with almost all of Hemingway's early fiction. He was devastated. Within about eighteen months he had rebuilt, writing new stories and publishing two small books in Paris, and he later developed his theory of omission in the work that followed.
A setback that destroys work can also strip away material that was not yet good enough. Starting again forced him to write with everything he had learned since. The loss was real, but it did not decide his career; what he did next did.
Tactic: Keep off-site backups of important work. When a project fails or is lost anyway, write down what you learned in the attempt before starting the next version.
Principle 8
Write from what you have lived.
Nearly every major Hemingway book rests on experience he had firsthand: the Italian front, Pamplona, Spain in the civil war, the Gulf Stream. He went to wars, bullrings, and fishing grounds, then transformed what he saw into fiction. Scholars have noted that he often asked "what if" of his own experiences and built the fiction from there.
Working within a circle of competence gives authority that research alone cannot supply. Readers trust details that come from observation. His weakest books were often those where the material was thinnest or the persona most prominent.
Tactic: Before starting a major project, list the experiences and knowledge you have firsthand that apply to it. Where the list is short, go and get the experience before you write or build.
Principle 9
Answer a failure with the work.
After critics savaged Across the River and Into the Trees in 1950, many decided Hemingway was finished. His response was a short, controlled novella written in a matter of weeks. The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer and was singled out in his Nobel citation.
He argued with critics in private and sometimes in public, but what changed the verdict was a better book. A strong new piece of work is the most persuasive rebuttal to a public failure because it shifts attention from the old argument to fresh evidence.
Tactic: After a public setback, resist writing a defense. Put the energy into a smaller, tightly scoped project you can finish quickly and to a high standard.
Principle 10
Choose distribution that matches the work.
The Old Man and the Sea was short enough to print whole in one issue of Life, and that single issue sold 5.3 million copies in two days before the book appeared. Earlier, A Farewell to Arms had been serialized in Scribner's Magazine before publication. Hemingway and his publishers used magazines to reach readers far beyond the book trade.
The format of a work determines where it can go. A novella fit a mass magazine in a way a long novel could not. Matching the product to the channel turned a short book into a national event.
Tactic: For your next launch, list every channel that could carry the full product rather than just an advertisement for it. Consider reshaping the product to fit the largest one.
Principle 11
Guard the work from the persona.
By the late 1930s Hemingway was as famous for hunting, fishing, war, and bravado as for his books. The persona sold magazines and books. It also crowded out work, invited mockery, and, some biographers argue, masked a more private man. In his Nobel speech he warned that a writer's public stature often grows as the work deteriorates.
A strong personal brand can amplify good work. The risk comes when maintaining the image starts to consume the time and attention that produced the work in the first place. The halo effect of fame can also blunt the honest criticism a creator needs.
Tactic: Track the share of your week spent on public appearances, interviews, and self-promotion. If it exceeds the time spent on the core work for more than a month, cut back.
Free playbook
Get The Business Model Playbook
58 business models, one visual page each: how the money flows, the metrics that matter, and who runs it. Free when you join the Faster Than Normal email.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Part IIIMaxims
-
Clarity is a trained habit. Hemingway's plain style began as a newspaper's house rules and became instinct through repetition.
-
Omission requires knowledge. Cutting is powerful only when you understand what you are cutting.
-
Effortless-looking work is usually the most worked. A simple page often hides dozens of drafts.
-
Momentum is a resource. Leaving work unfinished at the right place makes tomorrow easier.
-
Loneliness comes with serious work. Public life can help a career while harming the craft.
-
Fame distorts feedback. The more celebrated you become, the harder it is to hear honest criticism.
-
Experience is raw material, not the finished product. Hemingway lived dramatic events, but the value came from shaping them.
-
Health is part of the work. Head injuries, drink, and depression eroded the memory and focus his writing depended on.
-
A short book can reach the widest audience. Scale depends on fit with a channel as much as on length.
In Their Own Words
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.— Ernest Hemingway
I was blown up while giving out chocolate. I tried to carry a wounded man and I was wounded again in the legs and arms.— Ernest Hemingway
You are all a lost generation.— Gertrude Stein
The sun rose as they were finishing breakfast. Nick sat against the log and ate slowly. He was sleepy and felt strange.— Ernest Hemingway
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.— Ernest Hemingway
I love Paris like a mistress.— Ernest Hemingway
The first draft of anything is shit.— Ernest Hemingway
Write hard and clear about what hurts.— Ernest Hemingway
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.— Ernest Hemingway
I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.— Ernest Hemingway
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.— Ernest Hemingway
The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.— Ernest Hemingway
Courage is grace under pressure.— Ernest Hemingway
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.— Ernest Hemingway
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.— Ernest Hemingway
A man can be destroyed but not defeated.— Ernest Hemingway
Never confuse movement with action.— Ernest Hemingway
The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.— Ernest Hemingway
I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.— Ernest Hemingway
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.— Ernest Hemingway
We are all broken, that's how the light gets in.— Ernest Hemingway
The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.— Ernest Hemingway
Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.— Ernest Hemingway
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying.— Ernest Hemingway
In war: Resolution. In defeat: Defiance. In victory: Magnanimity. In peace: Goodwill.— Ernest Hemingway
The dead sleep cold.— Ernest Hemingway
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.— Ernest Hemingway
You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.— Ernest Hemingway
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.— Ernest Hemingway
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.— Ernest Hemingway
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.— Ernest Hemingway
All things truly wicked start from innocence.— Ernest Hemingway
Further reading
- Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures by Nicholas Reynolds
