How to Write Like Hemingway
Everyone knows the Hemingway formula: short sentences, plain words, no adverbs. Everyone who tries it writes something that reads like a telegram from a man with a head injury. The formula is accurate and almost useless, because short sentences are what the style looks like from the outside. They are the residue of the method, not the method.
This is a guide to what's actually underneath — where the style came from, the theory that generates it, and why the imitations fail in a specific and fixable way.
It started in a newsroom, not a garret
Before the novels, Hemingway was a teenage cub reporter at the Kansas City Star. The paper had a style sheet, and its opening rules are almost comically familiar: use short sentences, use short first paragraphs, use vigorous English, be positive rather than negative. He said later that these were the best rules he ever learned for writing, and that he'd never forgotten them.
That origin explains a lot. The style isn't a mystical minimalism — it's newsroom discipline applied to fiction, where nobody expected it. A reporter strips a sentence because the wire costs money and the reader is in a hurry. He kept stripping after the reason had gone, and discovered the absence did something the presence never could.
The iceberg is the actual engine
In Death in the Afternoon (1932), Hemingway laid out the idea plainly: a writer can leave out almost anything he genuinely knows, and the reader will feel it as strongly as if it had been written. The dignity of an iceberg, he said, comes from only a small part of it showing above the water.
Read that carefully, because there are two conditions and imitators drop the first one. The writer must know the omitted material. Omission only works if there's something down there to omit. If you simply never worked out what the scene is about and wrote short sentences around the hole, the reader doesn't sense a submerged mass — they sense nothing, because nothing is there.
This is the whole game. The plain sentences are a consequence of having removed the explanation. They are not a preference for plainness.
Omission is not the same as brevity
Here's the distinction that fixes most bad imitations. Consider:
"He was very sad. He missed her. It hurt a lot."
That's short. It is not omission — it's the explanation, chopped up. Every sentence states the interior fact directly; they're just curt about it. Hemingway would delete all three and give you the man ordering a second drink he doesn't want, and saying nothing about her at all.
The test: if you can point at the sentence that tells the reader how to feel, you haven't omitted anything yet. You've just been terse.
Concrete nouns, and a deep distrust of abstractions
One of the most important passages in A Farewell to Arms has the narrator reflecting that big abstract words — glory, honour, sacrifice — had come to feel obscene to him next to the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the dates. That's not just a character's disillusionment; it's the author's aesthetic stated out loud.
So his nouns do the work adjectives usually do. Not "a beautiful, peaceful river" but the river, the current, the stones on the bottom, the trout holding steady against the flow. He reports what is there with precision and lets you supply beautiful — which makes the beauty yours, and therefore real to you in a way an adjective can never be.
The rule: every time you're tempted to tell the reader how to rate a thing, describe the thing more precisely instead.
The "and" chain (polysyndeton)
Against the reputation for shortness, Hemingway writes some very long sentences — but they're long in a peculiar way, strung together with and after and after and, rather than built with subordinate clauses.
The technical name is polysyndeton, and the effect is specific: everything gets equal weight. Normal prose subordinates — it tells you which clause is the important one and which is background. An "and" chain refuses to rank. Things simply happen, one after another, the way they do to someone who is exhausted or in shock and has stopped sorting experience into important and unimportant.
That's why it feels the way it feels. The grammar is doing the emotional work that the withheld adjectives aren't.
Repeat the plain word on purpose
Every style guide tells you to vary your vocabulary. He does the opposite. Good appears over and over. Fine. Nice. The same flat words recur until they've been worn smooth.
This is deliberate, and it's structural. Against a flat, repetitive surface, the one unexpected word detonates. If every sentence is vivid, none of them are — vividness is a contrast effect. Most amateur prose is exhausting for exactly this reason: it's all peaks.
Dialogue that circles the subject
His characters almost never say what the scene is about. In "Hills Like White Elephants," a couple at a Spanish railway station discuss drinks, the scenery, and an unnamed operation. The subject of the entire story is never stated once, by anyone, and every reader knows exactly what it is.
The mechanism: people under pressure talk around the thing, not about it. What they discuss is a measure of what they're avoiding. When you write dialogue in this register, ask what the two people are refusing to mention — then have them not mention it, at length, while ordering drinks.
Worked example
Ordinary version, explaining everything:
"I was devastated when she left. I spent the whole evening trying not to think about how unbearably empty the apartment felt without her things in it."
Hemingway register:
"She left in the afternoon. I made coffee and drank it standing up. The apartment was clean now and there was room on the shelf where the books had been. I went out at six and had two drinks and came back and the coffee cup was still in the sink."
Look at what the second version never says: devastated, empty, lonely, unbearable. Not one interior word. It says coffee cup, and room on the shelf, and it chains the evening together with and so that nothing is ranked above anything else. The reader assembles the feeling and — because they built it — it's theirs.
Also note: it's not shorter. It's about the same length. Brevity was never the point.
About that six-word story
You'll see it everywhere: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," presented as a Hemingway story that proves his genius for compression, often with a tale about a bar bet. There's no good evidence he wrote it. Researchers have traced versions of the classified-ad conceit back to newspapers well before his career, and the attribution to Hemingway only appears decades later.
It's worth knowing, partly because using a fabricated anecdote to explain a real technique is precisely the kind of imprecision he'd have hated — and partly because the myth teaches the wrong lesson. It suggests his gift was shortness. It wasn't.
When this is the wrong tool
The iceberg fails at some jobs, and it's worth being blunt about which. Instructions. Arguments. Technical explanation. Anything where the reader genuinely needs the reasoning stated — omission there just produces confusion, and the reader doesn't sense a submerged mass, they sense that you've left something out.
The technique works where the point is what someone won't say. It's built for feeling, not for information. Applied to a status update, it's just unhelpful.
Short sentences aren't the style. They're what's left after you delete everything you were explaining.
A three-step practice
Take a paragraph of your own writing where you've described an emotion. First, delete every sentence that names the feeling. Second, ask what physical detail was in the room at that moment and put exactly one of them in. Third, join what remains with and instead of because or although.
Most of the time, the result is worse — and that's the useful part. It's worse when you didn't actually know what was underneath. The exercise reveals whether there was an iceberg or just a gap.
Want to see it applied to a line of your own? Pick Hemingway in the tool and watch what disappears.
Related reading: more on borrowing a voice by its habits rather than its costume — how to write like Shakespeare, how to write like Jane Austen, and how to write like Rumi.