Ernest Hemingway would have been 113 on Saturday. In honor of the grand (and oftentimes irreverent) thinker, writer and life enthusiast, I spent some time digging back through the litany of wisdom he left behind.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
“Write drunk; edit sober.”
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”
“In order to write about life first you must live it.”
“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
“Write hard and clear about what hurts. ”
CHIME IN: What’s your best piece of writing advice?