Wednesday Writers Write

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

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