The Best Intellectual Training For a Writer According to Ernest Hemingway

hemingway with gun

INTERVIEWER

What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?


HEMINGWAY

Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

From Paris Review Interview

Have you read Hemingway?

9 thoughts on “The Best Intellectual Training For a Writer According to Ernest Hemingway

  1. I read Hemingway and found him grossly overrated. Best advice for any writer: be a ferocious reader and don’t be snobbish about other people’s writing that is – currently – not categorised as “literature” by some dead-from-the-neck-down professor of literature.

      1. Exactly. I love reading very different genres and writers, for they all have something to teach me and help me with my own writing.

        In my experience, readers who are snobbish usually don’t know their mass market fiction from their literature anyway and wouldn’t know a good book if you bashed them over the head with it.

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