Writing Like Hemingway

If you want to be good at something you should find the greatest masters of that thing and copy them. This morning I'm trying to learn writing from Hemingway.

He uses the simplest possible phrases, so simple some people might be embarrassed to write them, but then he connects them with "and's" to create a sense of motion, of sights and sounds and actions tumbling over each other, and he uses "all" to give a kind of child-like sense of wonder to some specific descriptive detail that overwhelms him, and then, sometimes, a certain word or sound is repeated and repeated and repeated like the rhyming in a poem or the drumbeat in a song.

Look at this description of the sights along the way as Jake Barnes and his friends head to Spain for trout fishing:

"We passed some lovely gardens and had a good look back at the town, and then we were out in the country, green and rolling, and the road climbing all the time. We passed lots of Basques with oxen, or cattle, hauling carts along the road, and nice farmhouses, low roofs, and all white-plastered. In the Basque country the land all looks very rich and green and the houses and villages look well-off and clean. Every village had a pelota court and on some of them kids were playing in the hot sun. There were signs on the walls of the churches saying it was forbidden to play pelota against them, and the houses in the villages had red tiled roofs, and then the road turned off and commenced to climb and we were going way up close along a hillside, with a valley below and hills stretched off back toward the sea. You couldn't see the sea. It was too far away. You could see only hills and more hills, and you knew where the sea was."

In this short passage there are at least 18 "and's" which help to create that tumbling effect of so many sensations coming in we can't keep up with them. The "all" in "all white-plastered" I think gives a sense of childish wonder to something in the scene that just overwhelms us and goes beyond our ability to describe. The rhyming of "green" and "clean," the repetition of "roofs" and more obviously "pelota" and most dramatically of all "see" and "sea" repeated six times and "hill" four times in the last four sentences give us that drumbeat feel that adds to the motion of the writing.

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[One of the greatest novels ever written. If you have never read it now would be a great time!]
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A few pages later we find Hemingway using the same techniques like this:

"We climbed up and up and crossed another high Col and turned along it, and the road ran down to the right, and we saw a whole new range of mountains off to the south, all brown and baked-looking and furrowed in strange shapes."

Part of Hemingway's greatness is that he saw the world FRESH and was excited by it and described it clean and straight the way a very young and observant child might do if he were seeing the world for the very first time.

Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway