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- 📝 Ernest Hemingway’s Writing Routine
📝 Ernest Hemingway’s Writing Routine
"You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again."
Famous Writing Routines
February 05, 2024
Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.
Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, best-known for his many works such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea which are now regarded as literary classics.
I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.
Ernest Hemingway lived a rich, adventurous life. As an 18-year old, he enlisted to be an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, after failing to enlist in the U.S. Army due to poor eyesight, and was subsequently wounded by mortar fire.
He later wrote about his experiences in his 1942 anthology, Men at War. “When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you.”
Following World War I, Hemingway moved to Paris where he took a job as a foreign correspondent, and also wrote and published his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises. Over the years, Hemingway continued his work as a journalist, covering the Spanish Civil War and World War II — he was embedded with Allied troops during the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris.
During all of this time, Hemingway also hunted lions in Africa, caught giant marlins in the Bahamas, and boxed religiously. But no matter what, he always found time for writing.
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Read the rest of Ernest Hemingway’s writing routine here.
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