“The young writer would be a fool to fol­low a the­o­ry,” said the Nobel Prize-win­ning author William Faulkn­er in his 1958 Paris Review inter­view. “Teach your­self by your own mis­takes; peo­ple learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice.”

All the same, Faulkn­er offered plen­ty of advice to young writ­ers in 1957 and 1958, when he was a writer-in-res­i­dence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia. His var­i­ous lec­tures and pub­lic talks dur­ing that time–some 28 hours of discussion–were tape record­ed and can now be heard at the uni­ver­si­ty’s Faulkn­er audio archive. We combed through the tran­scripts and select­ed sev­en inter­est­ing quo­ta­tions from Faulkn­er on the craft of writ­ing fic­tion. In most cas­es they were points Faulkn­er returned to again and again. Faulkn­er had a way of stam­mer­ing when he com­posed his words out loud, so we have edit­ed out the rep­e­ti­tions and false starts. We have pro­vid­ed links to each of the Vir­ginia audio record­ings, which are accom­pa­nied by word-for-word tran­scripts of each con­ver­sa­tion.

1: Take what you need from oth­er writ­ers.

Faulkn­er had no qualms about bor­row­ing from oth­er writ­ers when he saw a device or tech­nique that was use­ful. In a Feb­ru­ary 25, 1957 writ­ing class he says:

I think the writer, as I’ve said before, is com­plete­ly amoral. He takes what­ev­er he needs, wher­ev­er he needs, and he does that open­ly and hon­est­ly because he him­self hopes that what he does will be good enough so that after him peo­ple will take from him, and they are wel­come to take from him, as he feels that he would be wel­come by the best of his pre­de­ces­sors to take what they had done.

2: Don’t wor­ry about style.

A gen­uine writer–one “dri­ven by demons,” to use Faulkn­er’s phrase–is too busy writ­ing to wor­ry about style, he said. In an April 24, 1958 under­grad­u­ate writ­ing class, Faulkn­er says:

I think the sto­ry com­pels its own style to a great extent, that the writer don’t need to both­er too much about style. If he’s both­er­ing about style, then he’s going to write pre­cious emptiness–not nec­es­sar­i­ly nonsense…it’ll be quite beau­ti­ful and quite pleas­ing to the ear, but there won’t be much con­tent in it.

3:  Write from experience–but keep a very broad def­i­n­i­tion of “expe­ri­ence.”

Faulkn­er agreed with the old adage about writ­ing from your own expe­ri­ence, but only because he thought it was impos­si­ble to do oth­er­wise. He had a remark­ably inclu­sive con­cept of “expe­ri­ence.” In a Feb­ru­ary 21, 1958 grad­u­ate class in Amer­i­can fic­tion, Faulkn­er says:

To me, expe­ri­ence is any­thing you have per­ceived. It can come from books, a book that–a sto­ry that–is true enough and alive enough to move you. That, in my opin­ion, is one of your expe­ri­ences. You need not do the actions that the peo­ple in that book do, but if they strike you as being true, that they are things that peo­ple would do, that you can under­stand the feel­ing behind them that made them do that, then that’s an expe­ri­ence to me. And so, in my def­i­n­i­tion of expe­ri­ence, it’s impos­si­ble to write any­thing that is not an expe­ri­ence, because every­thing you have read, have heard, have sensed, have imag­ined is part of expe­ri­ence.

 4: Know your char­ac­ters well and the sto­ry will write itself.

When you have a clear con­cep­tion of a char­ac­ter, said Faulkn­er, events in a sto­ry should flow nat­u­ral­ly accord­ing to the char­ac­ter’s inner neces­si­ty. “With me,” he said, “the char­ac­ter does the work.” In the same Feb­ru­ary 21, 1958 Amer­i­can fic­tion class as above, a stu­dent asked Faulkn­er whether it was more dif­fi­cult to get a char­ac­ter in his mind, or to get the char­ac­ter down on paper once he had him in his mind. Faulkn­er replies:

I would say to get the char­ac­ter in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work him­self. All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says. It’s the inges­tion and then the ges­ta­tion. You’ve got to know the char­ac­ter. You’ve got to believe in him. You’ve got to feel that he is alive, and then, of course, you will have to do a cer­tain amount of pick­ing and choos­ing among the pos­si­bil­i­ties of his action, so that his actions fit the char­ac­ter which you believe in. After that, the busi­ness of putting him down on paper is mechan­i­cal.

5: Use dialect spar­ing­ly.

In a pair of local radio pro­grams includ­ed in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia audio archive, Faulkn­er has some inter­est­ing things to say about the nuances of the var­i­ous dialects spo­ken by the var­i­ous eth­nic and social groups in Mis­sis­sip­pi. But in the May 6, 1958 broad­cast of “What’s the Good Word?” Faulkn­er cau­tions that it’s impor­tant for a writer not to get car­ried away:

I think it best to use as lit­tle dialect as pos­si­ble because it con­fus­es peo­ple who are not famil­iar with it. That nobody should let the char­ac­ter speak com­plete­ly in his own ver­nac­u­lar. It’s best indi­cat­ed by a few sim­ple, sparse but rec­og­niz­able touch­es.

6: Don’t exhaust your imag­i­na­tion.

“Nev­er write your­self to the end of a chap­ter or the end of a thought,” said Faulkn­er. The advice, giv­en more than once dur­ing his Vir­ginia talks, is vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to some­thing Ernest Hem­ing­way often said. (See tip num­ber two in “Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion.”) In the Feb­ru­ary 25, 1957 writ­ing class, Faulkn­er says:

The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Nev­er write your­self out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s eas­i­er to take it up again. If you exhaust your­self, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trou­ble with it.

7: Don’t make excus­es.

In the same Feb­ru­ary 25, 1957 writ­ing class, Faulkn­er has some blunt words for the frus­trat­ed writer who blames his cir­cum­stances:

I have no patience, I don’t hold with the mute inglo­ri­ous Mil­tons. I think if he’s demon-dri­ven with some­thing to be said, then he’s going to write it. He can blame the fact that he’s not turn­ing out work on lots of things. I’ve heard peo­ple say, “Well, if I were not mar­ried and had chil­dren, I would be a writer.” I’ve heard peo­ple say, “If I could just stop doing this, I would be a writer.” I don’t believe that. I think if you’re going to write you’re going to write, and noth­ing will stop you.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Sev­en Tips From F. Scott Fizger­ald on How to Write Fic­tion

F. Scott Fitzger­ald is often por­trayed as a nat­ur­al-born writer. “His tal­ent,” says Ernest Hem­ing­way in A Move­able Feast, “was as nat­ur­al as the pat­tern that was made by the dust on a but­ter­fly­’s wings.” But Fitzger­ald saw him­self in a dif­fer­ent light. “What lit­tle I’ve accom­plished,” he said, “has been by the most labo­ri­ous and uphill work.”

Last week we brought you Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion. Today we’re back with a sim­i­lar list of advice from Hem­ing­way’s friend and rival Fitzger­ald. We’ve select­ed sev­en quo­ta­tions from F. Scott Fitzger­ald on Writ­ing, which was edit­ed by Lar­ry W. Phillips and pub­lished in 1985 as a com­pan­ion to the Hem­ing­way book. As in the pre­vi­ous post, we’ve orga­nized the advice under our own head­ings and added some brief com­men­tary.

1: Start by tak­ing notes.

Fitzger­ald made a habit of record­ing his stray thoughts and obser­va­tions in note­books. He orga­nized the entries into cat­e­gories like “Feel­ings and emo­tions,” “Con­ver­sa­tions and things over­heard” and “Descrip­tions of girls.” When Fitzger­ald was giv­ing writ­ing advice to his mis­tress Sheilah Gra­ham in the late 1930s, he advised her to do the same. In her 1940 mem­oir, Beloved Infi­del, Gra­ham quotes Fitzger­ald as say­ing:

You must begin by mak­ing notes. You may have to make notes for years.… When you think of some­thing, when you recall some­thing, put it where it belongs. Put it down when you think of it. You may nev­er recap­ture it quite as vivid­ly the sec­ond time.

2: Make a detailed out­line of your sto­ry.

When Fitzger­ald was work­ing on a nov­el, he would sur­round him­self with charts out­lin­ing the var­i­ous move­ments and his­to­ries of his char­ac­ters. In a 1936 let­ter to nov­el­ist John O’Hara, he advis­es the younger nov­el­ist to start with a big out­line:

Invent a sys­tem Zolaesque…but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down an out­line of a nov­el of your times enor­mous in scale (don’t wor­ry, it will con­tract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the cen­tral point of the file as your big cli­max and fol­low your plan back­ward and for­ward from that for anoth­er three months. Then draw up some­thing as com­pli­cat­ed as a con­ti­nu­ity from what you have and set your­self a sched­ule.

3: Don’t describe your work-in-progress to any­one.

Fitzger­ald’s pol­i­cy was nev­er to talk with oth­er peo­ple about the book he was work­ing on. In a 1940 let­ter to his daugh­ter Scot­tie, he says:

I think it’s a pret­ty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it’s fin­ished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It nev­er quite belongs to you so much again.

4: Cre­ate peo­ple, not types.

Fitzger­ald was known for cre­at­ing emblem­at­ic char­ac­ters, but he said it was acci­den­tal. “I had no idea of orig­i­nat­ing an Amer­i­can flap­per when I first began to write,” he said in a 1923 inter­view for Met­ro­pol­i­tan mag­a­zine. “I sim­ply took girls who I knew very well and, because they inter­est­ed me as unique human beings, I used them for my hero­ines.” In the open­ing sen­tence of his 1926 short sto­ry, “The Rich Boy,” Fitzger­ald explains the prin­ci­ple:

Begin with an indi­vid­ual, and before you know it you find that you have cre­at­ed a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created–nothing.

5: Use famil­iar words.

In a 1929 let­ter to his col­lege friend and fel­low writer John Peale Bish­op, Fitzger­ald says:

You ought nev­er to use an unfa­mil­iar word unless you’ve had to search for it to express a del­i­cate shade–where in effect you have recre­at­ed it. This is a damn good prose rule I think.… Excep­tions: (a) need to avoid rep­e­ti­tion (b) need of rhythm © etc.

6: Use verbs, not adjec­tives, to keep your sen­tences mov­ing.

In a 1938 let­ter to his daugh­ter, Fitzger­ald writes:

About adjec­tives: all fine prose is based on the verbs car­ry­ing the sen­tences. They make sen­tences move. Prob­a­bly the finest tech­ni­cal poem in Eng­lish is Keats’ “Eve of Saint Agnes.” A line like “The hare limped trem­bling through the frozen grass,” is so alive that you race through it, scarce­ly notic­ing it, yet it has col­ored the whole poem with its movement–the limp­ing, trem­bling and freez­ing is going on before your own eyes.

7: Be ruth­less.

A writer has to make some hard choic­es. Fitzger­ald warns about the dan­ger of becom­ing too attached to some­thing you’ve writ­ten. Keep an objec­tive eye on the whole piece, he says, and if some­thing isn’t work­ing get rid of it. In a 1933 Sat­ur­day Evening Post arti­cle titled “One Hun­dred False Starts,” he writes:

I am alone in the pri­va­cy of my fad­ed blue room with my sick cat, the bare Feb­ru­ary branch­es wav­ing at the win­dow, an iron­ic paper weight that says Busi­ness is Good, a New Eng­land conscience–developed in Minnesota–and my great­est prob­lem:

“Shall I run it out? Or shall I turn back?”

Shall I say:

“I know I had some­thing to prove, and it may devel­op far­ther along in the sto­ry?”

Or:

“This is just bull­head­ed­ness. Bet­ter throw it away and start over.”

The lat­ter is one of the most dif­fi­cult deci­sions that an author must make. To make it philo­soph­i­cal­ly, before he has exhaust­ed him­self in a hun­dred-hour effort to resus­ci­tate a corpse or dis­en­tan­gle innu­mer­able wet snarls, is a test of whether or not he is real­ly a pro­fes­sion­al. There are often occa­sions when such a deci­sion is dou­bly dif­fi­cult. In the last stages of a nov­el, for instance, where there is no ques­tion of junk­ing the whole, but when an entire favorite char­ac­ter has to be hauled out by the heels, screech­ing, and drag­ging half a dozen good scenes with him.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Rare Footage of Scott and Zel­da Fitzger­ald From the 1920s

Win­ter Dreams: F.Scott Fitzger­ald’s Life Remem­bered in a Fine Film

F. Scott Fitzger­ald Reads From Shake­speare’s Oth­el­lo and John Mase­field­’s ‘On Grow­ing Old’ (c.1940)

Image by Lloyd Arnold via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

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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Relat­ed con­tent:

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

The Big Ernest Hem­ing­way Pho­to Gallery: The Nov­el­ist in Cuba, Spain, Africa and Beyond

The Span­ish Earth, Writ­ten and Nar­rat­ed by Ernest Hem­ing­way

Archive of Hemingway’s News­pa­per Report­ing Reveals Nov­el­ist in the Mak­ing

Find Cours­es on Hem­ing­way and Oth­er Authors in our big list of Free Online Cours­es