Less Is More, Says Hemingway

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Ernest Hemingway was famous for his sharp, sparse prose, but he never pretended it was easy. He once confided to writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit.“

Hemingway’s influence on modern writing is staggering. Couple that with his bullish, machismo persona and it’s no wonder his advice and his work continues to haunt writers to this day.

In a nutshell, he seems always to have believed that less is more when it comes to writing. It’s been a while since I read his work. A few years ago I read all of his novels in succession, but I haven’t revisited them since. I remember being awestruck by the amount of detail he was able to convey in the dialogue between characters.

Hemingway had this theory that writing should be like an iceberg:

If a writer of a prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

Knowing that Hemingway was all about economizing words, I always felt that his heavy use of dialogue (in comparison to other works of fiction I’d read with the exception of say, Raymond Carver) somehow fit that purpose, but I never understood how until I read his iceberg theory.

If you want to know a person as quickly as possible, do you go ask their friends to describe them for you? Isn’t the fastest way to know a person to speak with them directly?

One hundred words of intensely personal dialogue could take a thousand words to convey with description and by then the impact will be diluted. Then again, I don’t write fiction, only bullshit. I don’t get a lot of opportunities to write fictional dialogue.

Can you think of ways to use more dialogue into your writing? Are there other writing tools you employ that allow you to say more with less?

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