Earlier this year we informed readers that thousands of works of art and entertainment would soon enter the public domain—to be followed every year by thousands more. That day is nigh upon us: Public Domain Day, January 1, 2019. At the stroke of midnight, such beloved classics as Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Yes! We Have No Bananas” will become the common property of the people, to be quoted at length or in full anywhere when the copyright expires on work produced in 1923. Then, 1924 will expire in 2020, 1925 in 2021, and so on and so forth.
It means that “hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films” will become freely available to distribute, remix, and remake, as Glenn Fleishman writes at Smithsonian. “Any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations… and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments.”
Those are just a few ideas. See more extensive lists of hits and obscurities from 1923 at our previous post and come up with your own creative adaptations. The possibilities are vast and possibly world changing, in ways both decidedly good and arguably quite bad. Teachers may photocopy thousands of pages without fear of prosecution; scholars may quote freely, artists may find deep wells of inspiration. And we may also see “Frost’s immortal ode to winter used in an ad for snow tires.”
Such crassness aside, this huge release from copyright heralds a cultural sea change—the first time such a thing has happened in 21 years due to a 20-year extension of the copyright term in 1998, in a bill sponsored by Sonny Bono at the urging of the Walt Disney company. The legislation, aimed at protecting Mickey Mouse, created a “bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release of works from 1922 and 1923.” It is fascinating to consider how a government-mandated marketing decision has affected our understanding of history and culture.
The novelist Willa Cather called 1922 the year “the world broke in two,” the start of a great literary, artistic and cultural upheaval. In 1922, Ulysses by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” were published, and the Harlem Renaissance blossomed with the arrival of Claude McKay’s poetry in Harlem Shadows. For two decades those works have been in the public domain, enabling artists, critics and others to burnish that notable year to a high gloss in our historical memory. In comparison, 1923 can feel dull.
That year, however, marked the film debut of Marlene Dietrich, the publication of modernist landmarks like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jean Toomer’s Cane and far too many more influential works to name here. Find several more at Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Lifehacker, Indiewire, and The Atlanticand have a very happy Public Domain Day.
Public domain films and books will be added to ever-growing collections:
“It’s difficult to make predictions,” they say, “especially about the future.” The witticism has been variously attributed. If Yogi Berra said it, it’s adorable nonsense, if Mark Twain, dry plainspoken irony. If Niels Bohr, however, we have a statement that makes us wonder what exactly “the future” could mean in a radically uncertain universe.
If scientists can’t predict the future, who can? Science fiction writers, of course. They may be spectacularly wrong at times, but few professionals seem better equipped to imaginatively extrapolate from current conditions—cultural, technological, social, and political—and show us things to come. J.G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut… all have foreseen many of the marvels and dystopian nightmares that have arrived since their time.
In 1964, Asimov used the occasion of the New York World’s Fair to offer his vision of fifty years hence. “What will the World’s Fair of 2014 be like?” he asked in The New York Times, the question itself containing an erroneous assumption about the durability of that event. As a scientist himself, his ideas are both technologically farseeing and conservative, containing advances we can imagine not far off in our future, and some that may seem quaint now, though reasonable by the standards of the time (“fission-power plants… supplying well over half the power needs of humanity”).
Nineteen years later, Asimov ventured again to predict the future—this time of 2019 for The Star. Assuming the world has not been destroyed by nuclear war, he sees every facet of human society transformed by computerization. This will, as in the Industrial Revolution, lead to massive job losses in “clerical and assembly-line jobs” as such fields are automated. “This means that a vast change in the nature of education must take place, and entire populations must be made ‘computer-literate’ and must be taught to deal with a ‘high-tech’ world,” he writes.
The transition to a computerized world will be difficult, he grants, but we should have things pretty much wrapped up by now.
By the year 2019, however, we should find that the transition is about over. Those who can be retrained and re-educated will have been: those who can’t be will have been put to work at something useful, or where ruling groups are less wise, will have been supported by some sort of grudging welfare arrangement.
In any case, the generation of the transition will be dying out, and there will be a new generation growing up who will have been educated into the new world. It is quite likely that society, then, will have entered a phase that may be more or less permanently improved over the situation as it now exists for a variety of reasons.
Asimov foresees the climate crisis, though he doesn’t phrase it that way. “The consequences of human irresponsibility in terms of waste and pollution will become more apparent and unbearable with time and again, attempts to deal with this will become more strenuous.” A “world effort” must be applied, necessitating “increasing co-operation among nations and among groups within nations” out of a “cold-blooded realization that anything less than that will mean destruction for all.”
He is confident, however, in such “negative advances” as the “defeat of overpopulation, pollution and militarism.” These will be accompanied by “positive advances” like improvements in education, such that “education will become fun because it will bubble up from within and not be forced in from without.” Likewise, technology will enable increased quality of life for many.
… more and more human beings will find themselves living a life rich in leisure.
This does not mean leisure to do nothing, but leisure to do something one wants to do; to be free to engage in scientific research. in literature and the arts, to pursue out-of-the-way interests and fascinating hobbies of all kinds.
If this seems “impossibly optimistic,” he writes, just wait until you hear his thoughts on space colonization and moon mining.
The Asimov of 1983 sounds as confident in his predictions as the Asimov of 1964, though he imagines a very different world each time. His future scenarios tell us as much or more about the time in which he wrote as they do about the time in which we live. Read his full essay at The Star and be the judge of how accurate his predictions are, and how likely any of his optimistic solutions for our seemingly intractable problems might be in the coming year.
It’s that time of year when certain songs conspire with certain moods to hit you right in the ol’ brisket.
Thefeeling is voluptuous, and not necessarily unpleasant, provided there’s a bathroom stall or spare bedroom should you need to flee a party like Cinderella, as some old chestnut threatens to turn you into a blubbering mess.
Let the kiddies deck the halls, jingle bells, and prance about with Rudolph and Frosty. The best secular songs for grown ups are the ones with a thick current of longing just under the surface, a yearning for those who aren’t here with us, for a better future, for the way we were…
There’s got to be some hope in the balance though, some sweetness to savor as we muddle through.
(Judy Garland famously stonewalled on the first version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” until lyricist Hugh Martin agreed to lighten things up a bit. In the end, both got what they wanted. She got her update:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight
But the tension between the promise of a better tomorrow and her emotional delivery holds a place for Hughes’ appealingly dark sentiment:
As a rule, the oldies are the goodies in this department.
More recent bids by Coldplay and Taylor Swift have failed to achieve the proper mix of hope and hopelessness.
It’s a difficult balance, but singer-songwriter Ellia Bisker pulls it off beautifully, above, by turning to O. Henry’s enduring short story, “The Gift of the Magi.”
I want to give you something that I can’t afford,
Let you believe with me we’re really not so poor.
You see that package waiting underneath the tree?
It’s just a token of how much you mean to me.
(Spoiler for the handful of people unfamiliar with this tale: he does the same, thus negating the utility of both costly presents.)
In an interview with Open Culture, Bisker praised the O. Henry story’s ironic symmetry:
It’s a little like the death scene in Romeo & Juliet, but without the tragedy. The story itself still feels surprisingly fresh, despite the period details. It has more humor and sympathy to it than sentiment. It surprises you with real emotion.
The Romeo and Juliet comparison is apt. The story covers a time period so brief that the newlyweds’ feelings for each other never stray from purest wonder and admiration.
Bisker’s song starts, as it ends, with a pair of young, broke lovers who only have eyes for each other.
Let’s not forget O. Henry’s parting words:
The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
Enjoy this musical gift, readers. The artist has made the track free for downloading, though perhaps you could scratch up a few coins in thanks, without pawning your watch or cutting your hair.
Read O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi” here.
It became fashionable during the European Renaissance for poets to write what is called an ars poetica, a “meditation on poetry using the form and techniques of a poem.” The form follows Horace’s 19th century, B.C.E. Ars Poetica, in which the Roman writer recommends that poetry should both “instruct and delight.”
Theories of poetry varied from one generation to the next, but the ars poetica persisted throughout modern literary history and into the modernism of Archibald Macleish, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore, all of whom issued magisterial dicta about poetry that has stuck to it ever since.
“A poem should be motionless in time / As the moon climbs,” writes Macleish in his “Ars Poetica,” famously concluding, “A poem should not mean / But be.” In Moore’s “Poetry,” which she revised throughout her life, finally whittling it down to just three lines, she writes of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
Such cryptic images and elliptical aphorisms enact ambiguity as they prescribe it, but they make perfectly clear they are making critical judgments about the art of poetry. Then we have Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (1263), a poem that serves as her ars poetica, argues Evan Puschak, the Nerdwriter, in his video essay above, but purports on its surface to be about truth, capital “T.”
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —
Rarely is Dickinson so “direct,” says Puschak. “Known for ambiguity, odd manipulations in meter and rhyme” and “images that seem mysterious and sometimes out of place,” she wrote “poetry brimming with slant truth, poetry that’s seemingly laid out here, in perfect meter and matching rhymes.” The poem’s message is restated four times, from the thesis in the first line to the simile of the final four. “The meaning could not be more clear,” says Puschak.
But no, of course it’s not. A poem is not a manual or manifesto. Like those poems more explicitly about poetry, this one enacts the ambiguity it prescribes. Are we, for example, to “tell all the truth” as in “the whole truth?” or as in “tell everyone the truth”? Does “success” lie “in circuit” like a patient lies on a table? Or does it tell lies, like, well… like poetry? Does the word “circuit” refer to an uncertain, circuitous path? Or, as one critic has suggested, to “circumference” (a term Dickinson used to refer to one’s lifespan or proper sphere)?
The next couplet, whose reference to “infirm Delight” may or may not take Horace to task, pushes us further out to sea when we begin to read it carefully. What is this truth that can be told, slanted, but also comes as a “surprise,” like lightning—terrible, sudden, and blinding? Is this a poem about “Truth” or about poetry?
In the final, heavily truncated, version of “Poetry,” Marianne Moore concedes, grumpily, that “one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine.” As Dickinson’s poem demonstrates, trying to find a “place” in poetry for any stable meaning may be impossible. Still she insists that truth should “dazzle gradually,” an oxymoronic phrase, says Puschak, but it’s as evocative, if more abstract, as real toads in made-up gardens—both are paradoxical means of describing what poetry does.
Dickinson realized that her poem “had to be the philosophy… that feeling of the text being destabilized from within, oscillating from meaning to the negation of that meaning.” Truth is inexpressible, perhaps inaccessible, and maybe even fatal. Yet it may strike us, nonetheless, in the dazzling ambiguities of poetry.
In May of 1967,” writes Patrick Iber at The Awl, “a former CIA officer named Tom Braden published a confession in the Saturday Evening Post under the headline, ‘I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral.’” With the hard-boiled tone one might expect from a spy, but the candor one may not, Braden revealed the Agency’s funding and support of all kinds of individuals and activities, including, perhaps most controversially, in the arts. Against objections that so many artists and writers were socialists, Braden writes, “in much of Europe in the 1950’s [socialists] were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.”
Whatever truth there is to the statement, its seeming wisdom has popped up again in a recent Washington Post op-ed by Sonny Bunch, editor and film critic of the conservative Washington Free Beacon. The CIA should once again fund “a culture war against communism,” Bunch argues. The export (to China) he offers as an example? Boots Riley’s hip, anti-neoliberal, satirical film Sorry to Bother You, a movie made by a self-described Communist.
Proud declarations in support of CIA funding for “socialists” may seem to take the sting out of moral outrage over covert cultural tactics. But they fail to answer the question: what is their effect on artists themselves, and on intellectual culture more generally? The answer has been ventured by writers like Joel Whitney, whose book Finkslooks deeply into the relationship between dozens of famed mid-century writers and literary magazines—especially The Paris Review—and the agency best known for toppling elected governments abroad.
In an interview with The Nation, Whitney calls the CIA’s containment strategies “the inversion of influence. It’s the instrumentalization of writing.… It’s the feeling of fear dictating the rules of culture, and, of course, therefore, of journalism.” According to Eric Bennett, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Educationand in his book Workshops of Empire, the Agency instrumentalized not only the literary publishing world, but also the institution that became its primary training ground, the writing program at the University of Iowa.
The Iowa Writer’s Workshop “emerged in the 1930s and powerfully influenced the creative-writing programs that followed,” Bennett explains. “More than half of the second-wave programs, about 50 of which appeared by 1970, were founded by Iowa graduates.” The program “attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War”—at first through its director, self-appointed cold warrior Paul Engle, with funding from CIA front groups, the Rockefeller Foundation, and major corporations. (Kurt Vonnegut, an Iowa alum, described Engle as “a hayseed clown, a foxy grandpa, a terrific promoter, who, if you listened closely, talks like a man with a paper asshole.”)
Under Engle writers like Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman went through the program. In the literary world, its dominance is at times lamented for the imposition of a narrow range of styles on American writing. And many a writer has felt shut out of the publishing world and its coteries of MFA program alums. When it comes to certain kinds of writing at least, some of them may be right—the system has been informally rigged in ways that date back to a time when the CIA and conservative funders approved and sponsored the high modernist fiction beloved by the New Critics, witty realism akin to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (and later John Cheever), and magical realism (part of the agency’s attempt to control Latin American literary culture.)
These categories, it so happens, roughly correspond to those Bennett identifies as acceptable in his experience at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and to the writing one finds filling the pages of The Best American Short Stories annual anthologies and the fiction section of The New Yorker and The Paris Review. (Exceptions often follow the path of James Baldwin, who refused to work with the agency, and whom Paris Review co-founder and CIA agent Peter Matthiessen subsequently derided as “polemical.”)
Bennett’s personal experiences are merely anecdotal, but his history of the relationships between the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the explosion of MFA programs in the last 40 years under its influence, and the CIA and other groups’ active sponsorship are well-researched and substantiated. What he finds, as Timothy Aubry summarizes at The New York Times, is that “writing programs during the postwar period” imposed a discipline instituted by Engle, “teaching aspiring authors certain rules of propriety.”
“Good literature, students learned, contains ‘sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.’” These rules have become so embedded in the aesthetic canons that govern literary fiction that they almost go without question, even if we encounter thousands of examples in history that break them and still manage to meet the bar of “good literature.” What is meant by the phrase is a kind of currency—literature that will be supported, published, marketed, and celebrated. Much of it is very good, and much happens to have sufficiently satisfied the gatekeepers’ requirements.
In a reductive, but interesting analogy, Motherboard’s Brian Merchant describes “the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop” as a “content farm” first designed to optimize for “the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.” Its algorithm: “More Hemingway, less Dos Passos.” As Aubry notes, quoting from Bennett’s book:
Frank Conroy, Engle’s longest-serving successor, who taught Bennett, “wanted literary craft to be a pyramid.” At the base was syntax and grammar, or “Meaning, Sense, Clarity,” and the higher levels tapered off into abstraction. “Then came character, then metaphor … everything above metaphor Conroy referred to as ‘the fancy stuff.’ At the top was symbolism, the fanciest of all. You worked from the broad and basic to the rarefied and abstract.”
The direct influence of the CIA on the country’s preeminent literary institutions may have waned, or faded entirely, who can say—and in any case, the institutions Whitney and Bennett write about have less cultural valence than they once did. But even so, we can see the effect on American creative writing, which continues to occupy a fairly narrow range and show some hostility to work deemed too abstract, argumentative, experimental, or “postmodern.” One result may be that writers who want to get funded and published have to conform to rules designed to co-opt and corral literary writing.
Beneath Kurt Vonnegut’s grim, absurdist humor beat the heart of a humanist, but not, by any stretch, an optimist. Vonnegut looked balefully at every project intended to improve the sorry state of human affairs. In Player Piano, for example, he imagines a future very much like that envisioned for us by our contemporary technocratic elite: nearly all work has been automated and the mass of unemployed are given a modest stipend for their living and funneled into what anthropologist David Graeber might call “bullshit jobs.”
“Finally,” Ed O’Loughlin writes at The Irish Times, “Vonnegut’s non-tech proles rise up against the machines that have perversely enslaved them, smashing all that they can find. For Vonnegut, ever the pessimist, this is not a happy ending; the revolution runs out of steam, collapses internally, and the remaining rebels go happily to work in the wreckage of their struggle, eagerly repairing the machines that they destroyed themselves.” This bleak satire can seem almost upbeat next to the fatalism of his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five.
In this book, Vonnegut uses an alien race called the Tralfamadorians to illustrate the idea that “all moments—past, present, and future—always have existed… always will exist,” as the Mia Nacamulli-scripted TED-Ed animation above explains. The aliens keep the novel’s hero, Billy Pilgrim, in a human zoo, where they patiently explain to him the inevitability of all things, including the bombing of Dresden, an event Vonnegut personally survived, “only to be sent into the ruins as prison labor,” notes Paul Harris at The Guardian, “in order to collect and burn the corpses.”
To say that Vonnegut, who once worked as a press writer for General Electric, was skeptical of scientific plans for managing nature, human or otherwise, would be a major understatement. As he watched GE scientists embark on a project for controlling the weather (while the company’s “military collaborators have more aggressive plans in mind”), Vonnegut began to demand “an answer to one of science’s greatest ethical questions,” writes WNYC: “are scientists responsible for the pursuit of knowledge alone, or are they also responsible for the consequences of that knowledge?”
The question becomes even more complicated if we accept the premise that the future is foreordained, but without the intervention of all-seeing aliens, there is no reliable way for us to predict it. Vonnegut’s experiences at GE formed the basis of his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, in which a military technology called Ice-nine ends up freezing all of the world’s oceans and bringing on cataclysmic storms. Cat’s Cradle’s characters survive by adopting a religion in which they tell themselves and others deliberate lies, and by so doing, invent a kind of meaning in the midst of hopelessness.
Vonnegut stressed the importance of contingency, of “growing where you’re planted,” so to speak. The best options for his characters involve caring for the people who just happen to be around. “We are here to help each other through this thing,” he wrote, “whatever it is.” That last phrase is not an evasion; the complexities of the universe are too much for humans to grasp, Vonnegut thought. Our attempts to create stable truths and certainties—whether through abstract in-group identities or grand technological designs—seem bound to cause exponentially more suffering than they solve.
Vonnegut may have achieved far more acclaim in his lifetime than his contemporary Philip K. Dick, but he felt similarly neglected by the “literary establishment,” Harris writes. “They interpreted his simplistic style, love of science fiction and Midwestern values as being beneath serious study.” (See, for example the 1969 New York Times review of Slaughterhouse-Five.) But perhaps even more than the perennially relevant Dick, Vonnegut’s work speaks to us of our current predicament, and offers, if not optimism, at least a very limited form of hope, in our capacity to “help each through this thing,” whatever it is.
Book historians and rare manuscript librarians do not have the most glamorous jobs by the usual standards. They deal with weathered, tattered, fragmentary scraps of text in archaic languages and lettering. It’s work unlikely to receive the Hollywood (or Netflix) treatment unless wizards, witches, or occult detectives are involved. But the relative obscurity of these professions does not make the work any less valuable. Without dedicated archivists and preservationists, a slow collective amnesia, or worse, can set in.
One might call this attitude precious. Specialists are useful, art is great, but with sophisticated machine learning, we can make, store, and print copies of every historical artifact in the world, along with all of the accumulated knowledge about them. What need to dote on crumbling manuscripts? Why the special status of the original? The question, taken up by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” comes down in part to something he called “aura.”
Take the case of four manuscripts, all of which recently appeared together at the British Library’s extensive exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War: The Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf Manuscript contain riddles, religious texts, elegies, and the oldest manuscript of the oldest known poem in English. These represent the sum total of extant original literary manuscripts in Old English, a tongue several centuries distant from our own but still embedded deep within the structure of every modern version of the language.
Each manuscript has what, as Benjamin wrote, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking… its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Josephine Livingstone puts the matter more plainly at The New Republic.
Why are these four books so special? It has to do, I think, with the concept of the original—a concept we have almost entirely lost touch with. The Beowulf Manuscript… is not merely a representation of a story; it is the story…. The manuscripts confront us with a former version of our literary selves; identities that we barely recognize, and which estrange us from ourselves.
We can reproduce history infinitely, but the only way to experience the humbling otherworldliness that dwarfs our cramped ideas about it is through its physical remainders. Livingstone doesn’t clarify whom she includes in the phrase “our literary selves,” but we might as well say, at minimum, this means every speaker of English and everyone who has read English literature in translation or felt the influence of English words and phrases in other languages.
We acquire the language we hear and read from literary sources, however remote; they are constitutive, the threads that weave together cultural narratives into a larger pattern. The original work of art, Benjamin argued, like the relic, has religious significance. And where the relic grounds the cult, art grounds material culture in such a way, he thought, that it repels fascism’s aesthetic obsession with destruction.
Original artifacts “must restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses,” literary scholar Susan Buck-Morss elaborates, “for the sake of humanity’s self-preservation.” The statement may sound less grandiose in the context of Europe in 1936, or we might consider it just as relevant today (and expand it to include not only art but nature).
We can rely on the fact that, should the Beowulf Manuscript be destroyed, Livingstone grants, “the poem would still survive,” as would the image of the manuscript in very fine detail. That is “the hope contained in Benjamin’s dirge.” But what is lost can never appear in the world again. You can view most of these rare texts—The Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, and the Beowulf Manuscript—in high resolution scans at the British and Bodleian Libraries.
The texts are a minuscule sampling of the number of cultural artifacts around the world worthy of preservation, and publicity. And they are a tiny sampling of the literary production of Old English. But on them rests a great deal of our understanding about the linguistic ancestors of the language, with more to learn, perhaps, as scanning technology becomes even more advanced, illuminating rather than replacing the original.
Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction. He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hemingway on Writing.
We’ve selected seven of our favorite quotations from the book and placed them, along with our own commentary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and readers alike–find them fascinating.
1: To get started, write one true sentence.
Hemingway had a simple trick for overcoming writer’s block. In a memorable passage in A Moveable Feast, he writes:
Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.
2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.
There is a difference between stopping and foundering. To make steady progress, having a daily word-count quota was far less important to Hemingway than making sure he never emptied the well of his imagination. In an October 1935 article in Esquire ( “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter”) Hemingway offers this advice to a young writer:
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.
3: Never think about the story when you’re not working.
Building on his previous advice, Hemingway says never to think about a story you are working on before you begin again the next day. “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Moveable Feast:
When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
4: When it’s time to work again, always start by reading what you’ve written so far.
T0 maintain continuity, Hemingway made a habit of reading over what he had already written before going further. In the 1935 Esquire article, he writes:
The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.
5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.
Close observation of life is critical to good writing, said Hemingway. The key is to not only watch and listen closely to external events, but to also notice any emotion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and identify precisely what it was that caused the emotion. If you can identify the concrete action or sensation that caused the emotion and present it accurately and fully rounded in your story, your readers should feel the same emotion. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes about his early struggle to master this:
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.
6: Use a pencil.
Hemingway often used a typewriter when composing letters or magazine pieces, but for serious work he preferred a pencil. In the Esquire article (which shows signs of having been written on a typewriter) Hemingway says:
When you start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none. So you might as well use a typewriter because it is that much easier and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.
7: Be Brief.
Hemingway was contemptuous of writers who, as he put it, “never learned how to say no to a typewriter.” In a 1945 letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway writes:
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in February 2013.
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