When I visited the Hemingway estate in Key West, Florida a few years ago, I learned lots about the famous writer. I discovered he had a word count limit of 600 words before he would quit for the day and head to Sloppy Joe’s for a brew with his compadres. Also, I learned that he was a womanizer, who cheated on the women in his life. I found out that he had an affinity for stray cats that he gleefully took in whenever they would arrive. Hemingway was a rockstar author of his day with movies made from his novels. He was a living legend, like Stephen King.

But what I found out as I toured his estate was something that I already knew: Ernest Hemingway was obsessed with language. In a separate house out back, Hemingway kept a writing nook, filled with paintings, a library, artifacts from his travels around the world, and a typewriter. This was where he would, without hesitation, every day, craft his most famous works that would make his name live throughout the ages. Continue along to read what you can learn from Hemingway’s habits. 

600 Words

Let’s begin with what I found to be the most surprising information on my journey to the Hemingway home.

Ernest Hemingway didn’t live an easy life. He was in WWI, broke bones, nearly died several times, and couldn’t stay faithful to a woman for too long. His life was filled drama—from his own free will and from fate. A dedicated writer who had endured such personal setbacks, you would think, would sit inside his or her home and write 3,000 words each day. They would have an endless amount of stories to tell, right?

So, why did Hemingway set his bar so low? Why only a simple 600 word count each day that he could finish before breakfast and go to the pub? Most writers, like Stephen King, set a word count at 2,000 each day. With a number that high, the book will finish itself quicker.

Hemingway was a writer of a different caliber. He knew himself. He knew he only needed to write 600 words each day because those 600 words were just enough for the story he planned to tell. If you have read any of his works, you know there isn’t any fluff to his stories. His prose and his dialogue show and tell just enough that the chosen words detail a vivid story.

And he wrote every day, regardless of the situation. He was dedicated to writing. Some writers may write several thousand words, but then slack off for the rest of the week, making it more difficult to begin again. When you stop writing your story every day, it becomes harder to get back in the groove and concentrate. And even worse, you likely will have a tough time remembering the path of the plot and the characters.

Write every day, even if it is a small word count.

Check out a short video on Hemingway’s life:

No Fluff

If there is one thing Hemingway is known for, it is his talent to write straightforward sentences. His prose wasn’t poetic or pretty. It was direct, which was, and still is, taboo in fiction writing—especially literary fiction.

His entire collection of fiction and non-fiction ring true of this. His prose is so direct that it mirrors on fairytale storytelling. This is not an insult, but a compliment. His ability to tell a captivating story without the fluff of varied adjectives and an assortment of complicated words most writers use to gain credibility is non-existent. Hemingway can tell his story without the fluff.

Why Less Fluff?

If you ever worked in journalism or analyzed most news articles, you will find how straightforward the news must be at all times. Readers who enjoy the news need it easy to read. Even news anchors on television, never use complex words. Nor do they ask their interviewee’s elaborate questions. They get right to the point. Typically, news articles are written so a high school student can understand.

Ernest Hemingway, as you surely know, was a journalist for many years. (Rather than begin a detailed outline of his history, just Google it.) Because he had many years of experience with journalism writing, it forced his method of limited storytelling-fluff. Rarely, will you see a Hemingway piece that maximizes prose. That is not to say he didn’t write long sentences. He did. Sometimes, a writer needs to make a long sentence to tell the story.

His years of journalism influenced his fiction writing. And that is what set him apart from all others. He was original, a writer uncontaminated from literary prose. And instead, he incorporated his own writing style into his novels. Pick up any one of them and you will read prose unlike the writers of his era and unlike the one’s today.

Here is an excerpt from his debut novel, “The Sun Also Rises” (1926):

“I watched a good-looking girl walk past the table and watched her go up the street and lost sight of her, and watched another, and then saw the first one coming back again. She went by once more and I caught her eye, and she came over and sat down at the table. The waiter came up.” (p.12)

Hemingway’s work oozes with direct, easy-flowing prose like this. Take note how, although the first sentence is somewhat long, his usage of adjectives and adverbs are zero (other than “good-looking”). The prose of 21st-century writers does not read like this. They are littered with fluff, so much so that this quick scene would stretch on and probably begin describing clouds and insects just to set the scene. Hemingway didn’t waste his time with nonsense (fluff). He said what he need to—just like his 600 daily word count—and kept it moving.

Also, note his several uses of “and” within the same sentence. This is typical-Hemingway. Rather than begin a new sentence, he decided to keep going, injecting conjunctions (“and”) to maintain the thought of the sentence. He knew once he ended with a period that the progression of the sentence, and therefore the main drive, will disappear, never to return. So, to combat this he adds a few extra conjunctions.

Normally, adding conjunctions is not how we generally speak in conversation, nor how authors write their stories. But it works here because he doesn’t use any adjectives or adverbs that will overtake the conjunction “and,” making the sentence too elaborate.

Finally, he ended the paragraph with, “The waiter came up.” Four simple words that close off the multiple conjunctions used in the two prior sentences. It quickly sets up the dialogue that happens immediately after the waiter arrives.

The Realism

Hemingway didn’t write fantastical stories. He was in World War I, so his existence was grounded with severe realism from what he had experienced in war. He probably couldn’t suspend his disbelief enough to even imagine anything but realistic situations and characters. His characters are generally facing a personal challenge, something interior they must endure and battle and defeat. He knew how to write the human experience.

His Pulitzer-prize and Nobel-prize winning short novel, “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) is a great example of this:

“On the brown walls of the flattened, overlapping leaves of the sturdy fibred guano there was a picture in color of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and another of the Virgin of Cobre. These were relics of his wife. Once there had been a tinted photograph of his wife on the wall but he had taken it down because it made him too lonely to see it and it was on the shelf in the corner under his clean shirt.” (p.6)

The main character mourns the death of his wife. But Hemingway doesn’t dwell on it. He could get into the details of how the MC thinks about her daily and torments himself because she is not there. But he doesn’t. Instead, he sets up two items she found special before she died. Then a short 6-word sentence breaks it up, telling the reader that these items were his wife’s—simple and straight to the point. The next sentence quickly shed light on how the MC reacts to items that remind him of his wife by telling us he took it down and placed it under another object.

With 3 sentences, Hemingway just told us mounds about the MC without going overboard. Some writers would take advantage of this mourning scene and begin telling even more, which would saturate the scene and spoil the character. Sometimes less is more.

The importance of this, however, is that this minimalism must stay throughout the entire story. A sudden, major description of character-realism will not work. It won’t match the rest of the story. A reader will notice the shift in tone and lose attention.

Those are the 2 main things that Ernest Hemingway did better than other writers. There is a paid app you can buy if you want a software editor to check your work to make it minimal like Hemingway. My article on realistic characters is another helpful post you should read if you want to improve your story.

And if you need a professional editor to review your novel, please check out my services page for more details.

Keep writing!

~M