Ernest "Papa" Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
(Ernest Hemingway)

I'm not sure that's anything to brag about. I mean, people suffering dementia can say the same.

That said, I like Ernest Hemingway's writing style - clean, efficient, sparse with words.

What I like most is that he's a good story teller in, "A Farewell to Arms," "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and other stories.

I DON'T think that his penchant for cutting down on words is, in and of itself, "art." It's a style...his own unique style. Most who've sought to replicate it, have failed to find success, mostly because they've failed to tell good stories.

Just as Mozart said, "A symphony takes as many notes as it takes," a story takes as many words as it takes.

Once Hemingway challenged others to "Tell a story in as few words as possible." He claimed the best offering was just 6 words, "Unworn baby shoes for sale...cheap."

His point was that a story should be like an iceberg, with 90% of it unseen.

The above six words aren't a story, just a brief sentence, expressing lament. The story is in the details...always in the details, sights, sounds, smells, words that put the reader in place.

The best of Hemingway's stories do that.

Can You Tell a Story in 6 words?

Ernest Hemingway young and old

Ernest (Pappa) Hemingway was famous for his economy with words, which he turned into his own iconic style.

He often said that a story should be like an iceberg, with most of the story beneath the surface. At one point he put it, "If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

Of course, Hemingway said a lot of things, some of them insightful, "Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination," and some of them prescient, "There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it."

Hemingway was allegedly once challenged to tell a story in 6 words and came up with, "Baby shoes for sale, never worn." He allegedly proclaimed it was the greatest story he ever wrote.

I've never been a big fan of the super-short story, but then again, I've never been accused of having "an economy with words," despite having penned a few terrible attempts at the mythological 6-word story, like;

"Lost keys, locked out...new house," and "Boat sinks, 6 onboard...toddler survives" and my favorite, "I'm a dick, so are you"...which isn't so much of a "story," but a misguided attempt some Confucian humor.

While I DID very much like A Farewell to Arms and The snows of Kilimanjaro (and a few other Hemingway offerings, like A Clean Well Lighted Place and A Way You'll Never Be), BUT I think that (1) his journalistic styled economy with words (in his day, journalists conserved words to send stories across the new Trans-Atlantic Cable) has inspired every modern-day "journalist" to consider (or ill-consider) him/herself to be a "gifted novelist" at heart AND (2) That "economy with words” DID often eviscerate much of the prose that once made great writing...well, GREAT!