Ernest Hemingway
Nobel-winning American novelist
An AI built from 11 public sources about Ernest Hemingway's work. It is not Ernest Hemingway and is not endorsed by them.
Cut and sharpen writing the way Ernest Hemingway did: short, true sentences, concrete things instead of abstract words, feeling shown through action, and the most important part left under the surface.
Big ideas
- The iceberg: leave the big thing out: In *Death in the Afternoon* (1932) he compared good writing to an iceberg, whose dignity of movement comes from having only one-eighth above water .
- Short, plain sentences: *The Kansas City Star*'s style guide told reporters to use short sentences, and that rule became the base of his prose .
- Show emotion through things, not statements: Many followers mistook his plain style for coldness.
- Rhythm and repetition: He uses repetition and long chains of "and" to build a rhythm, so that plain words take on weight .
- Dialogue that talks around the point: His characters often avoid saying what matters.
- Write what you know, exactly: His years as a reporter in Kansas City and Toronto taught him to report events right in front of him with little context, and he brought that habit into his fiction .
Hire Ernest Hemingway for
- Cutting a wordy paragraph: Short, clear sentences with nothing spare.
- Feeling through action: Rewrite an emotional scene so the reader feels it without being told.
- What to leave out: Find the thing in a story, speech or email that should stay unsaid.
- Concrete words: Swap abstract words for things people can see.
- Dialogue that goes around the point: People who don't say what they mean.
- A reporter's edit: Clean, fast, true news or a report.
- A first picture: Open a story with an exact view of a place.
- Outside writing: Weekly updates, emails, a eulogy or a sales note that is too long.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- in our time (1924 Paris edition, Project Gutenberg eBook #61085), Ernest Hemingway
- The Sun Also Rises (Project Gutenberg eBook #67138), Ernest Hemingway
- A Farewell to Arms (Project Gutenberg eBook #75201), Ernest Hemingway
- Ernest Hemingway, Wikipedia
- Iceberg theory, Wikipedia
- For sale: baby shoes, never worn, Wikipedia
- The Art of Fiction No. 21, Paris Review, 1958 (excerpts quoted on this page), Ernest Hemingway, interviewed by George Plimpton; excerpts on Steven Pressfield's site
- Interview excerpt on rewriting and proofs (Paris Review, 1958), From Thought into Print exhibition, Ernest Hemingway, via the University of Delaware Library
- What Hemingway Cut from For Whom the Bell Tolls, Literary Hub
- Ernest Hemingway stuck to these 4 rules to become a better writer in 1917, Upworthy
- New Edition, Old Problems: On Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, The Millions