Hemingway on Writing

The sources span the shelf: Death in the Afternoon's iceberg statement; Green Hills of Africa's campfire seminar on what destroys American writers; A Moveable Feast's working rules — the morning hours, the one true sentence, stopping when you know what happens next so tomorrow starts moving; the Paris Review interview's flintier formulations; and the letters, where the advice came person-to-person with the profanity intact. Phillips's arrangement turns the scattered asides into a coherent doctrine — which, read together, they turn out always to have been.

The book's charm is its self-contradiction: an author who held that writers who talk about craft are spending capital, caught having talked about it his whole life, brilliantly. It became the standard graduation gift and workshop staple within a season of publication, and its core instructions — write one true sentence; stop while it's going good; never think about the story after hours so the well refills — have passed so deep into writing culture that people quote them without knowing the source. This volume is the source, organized.

Thirteen thematic sections: What Writing Is and Does; The Qualities of a Writer; Working Habits; the iceberg chapter (Knowing What to Leave Out); characters, titles, and other writers; the perils of talking about it — each built from short passages with their sources cited, letters and books and interviews interleaved so the doctrine argues with itself agreeably.

An hour to read, a career to apply — and the rare craft book whose every page was written by the century's most imitated stylist without knowing it was for this book.