10 Writing Tips from Ernest Hemingway

1.     Convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader

2.     Project the truth in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it

3.     Write a structurally cohesive work that is architecturally perfect, “prose is architecture, not interior decoration.”

4.     Strip language clean, down to the bone

5.     Cut out a thousand words to make one word important

6.     Train like an artist by observing people and actions

7.     Try to understand and not judge the human motivation behind what they said or did

8.     Practice writing down these observations until the writer captures the image exactly

9.     Edit ruthlessly by removing all the “fake and overblown.”

10.   Study good writers: Fielding, Kipling, Twain, James, Crane, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov,                          Stendhal, Flaubert, Maupassant, Mann, and Joyce. 

Hemingway on Writing, Robert C. Hart, College English, Vol. 18, No. 6 (Mar., 1957), pp. 314-320

I just finished reading The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, a beautiful book about a man named Hig and his dog, Jasper, who survive a pandemic outbreak that kills most of the population. He loses everyone and fights to survive in a lawless world. He struggles with the meaning of his life and if it is worth living. 

The video below is from Peter Heller's website and provides a nice trailer for the book. 

NPRbooks 
Maureen Corrigan writes in her review, Dickensian Ambition and Emotion Make 'Goldfinch' Worth the Wait, "The Goldfinch far exceeds the expectations of those of us who've been waiting on Tartt to do something extraordinary again, ever since her debut novel, The Secret History, came out in 1992."

The New York Times, Sunday Book Review
Steven King writes in his review, Flights of Fancy, “The Goldfinch” is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of “The Goldfinch,” they never do."

The Rumpus
Lydia Kiesling writes in her review, Saturday Book Review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, "Donna Tartt is catnip for educated people who want to read entertaining but not difficult things about lofty topics and cosmopolitan people."

The Washington Post
Ron Charles writes in his review, Book Review: The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, "Indeed, Charles Dickens floats through these pages like Marley’s ghost. You can hear the great master in everything from the endlessly propulsive plot to the description of a minor character with a “cleft chin, doughball nose, tense slit of a mouth, all bunched tight in the center of a face which glowed a plump, inflamed, blood-pressure pink.”

Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist  is coming to Left Bank Books - Downtown on Thursday, March 13 at 7pm. to talk about his new novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

Left Bank Books - Downtown
321 N. 10th
St. Louis, MO 63101