Ernest Hemingway on Writing

Preface

Throughout Ernest Hemingway's career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing -- that it takes off "whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk's feathers if you show it or talk about it."

Despite this belief, by the end of his life he had done just what he intended not to do. In his novels and stories, in letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned articles on the subject, Hemingway wrote often about writing. And he wrote as well and as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived. His comments and observations on the craft accumulated over his lifetime into a substantial body of work -- comments which are, for the most part, easy to excerpt from the text surrounding them.

The process which led to this collection began several years ago, and had its start, as perhaps all such books have their start, with my admiration for the author and his writing, and with my own search for the rules of writing. The idea was originally inspired by Thomas H. Moore, who did a similar book on Henry Miller, noting as he went passages which touched on the subject of writing, and collecting them.

Collecting the opinions of one man on a given subject, as expressed ... read full excerpt from: Ernest Hemingway on Writing ebook