In Issue 29 - How To Write In Your Dead Time - I wrote about how I’ve been experimenting with dictation. One of the things I’ve been doing is finding writing or practice quotes - or preferably, writing and practice quotes - and using dictations to riff off those quotes.
Some of those 'dictation riffs’ have become mini essays that I’ve published as notes. For example, the latest one was based on a William Goldman quote about protecting your writing time (to the death):
One of those quotes that I riffed on was the Hemingway quote that is the title of this issue. And those riffs have been ‘assembled’ into a longer form piece than I either imagined or intended.
Although these ‘quote-riffs’ were intended as ways of exploring dictation, the concept that ‘writing’ is ‘thinking on paper’ applies here, and it helps solidify some of the ideas and beliefs that I have about writing and writers. And, as I riff on more quotes that relate to practice, it will illuminate what I think about how to practice your writing.
Back to Hemingway’s quote.
#1 “The First Draft Of Everything Is Shit”
This Hemingway quote is nearly always taken out of context. It appeared in a book called: WITH HEMINGWAY: A YEAR IN CUBA AND KEY WEST by Arnold Samuelson.
Here’s the full quote, and this isn’t a verbatim transcription of what Hemingway said but the author’s recollection:
"Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.
The only thing I can advise you is to keep on writing but it’s a damned tough racket. The only reason I make any money at it is I’m a sort of literary pirate. Out of every ten stories I write, only one is any good and I throw the other nine away."
So the direct quote - ‘the first draft of everything is shit - is taken out of context and is often used to lend authority to the following ideas:
• It doesn’t matter if your first draft is terrible. Because it can be rewritten.
• It’s easier to edit crappy words than to edit a blank page.
• Rewriting is more important than the original writing (and conception).
I don’t agree with any of that.
#2 Every Writer Has His Or Her Own Method Of Writing.
These ideas are a blanket generalisation and pay no credence to the possibility that different writers have different writing methods. We are all unique and we all have our own method of writing.
For some writers it's true that the first draft is about getting words on paper which can then be edited into something approachingthe writers vision. But there are writers whose first drafts are clearn and require minimal revisions.
Blanket adherence to the ideas presented in the standalone no mind to any differences in writing methods.
Sidebar: you can train yourself to write clean first drafts. There are even writers - though few who are willing to admit it - who write first drafts and never edit.
The context that needs to be added if you repeat or reuse the Hemingway quote is this: Hemingway considered that his first drafts needed considerable editing. It’s worth noting that Hemingway’s journalistic background had a deep influence on this - he wrote in the days when words were manually type set before going to print. But he developed his own style that was unique to him. That doesn’t mean it should automatically apply to you.
One other thing worth noting: humans are fallible interview subjects with subjective memories and subconscious biases. Whenever anyone is interviewed about their achievements, their answers may either exaggerate something (for dramatic effect) or omit something or play it down (so that they look better).
#3 The Quote Encourages A Dismissive Approach To The First Draft.
The second reason I don't like Hemingway's quote - and the way it’s presented out of context - is that it makes writers view their first drafts dismissively. I’ve seen people refer to their first drafts as “vomit drafts” or “crappy first drafts” or stream of conscious drafts.
The thinking that develops from this approach is that you can literally put any crap into your first draft which can then be edited and made better. Or that it doesn’t matter because it’s discovery writing. (As in, you discover what you are going to write about.)
If you don’t know what to write about - and one of the purposes of writing is to record and order your thoughts on paper - then, instead of doing a steam of conscious draft, you should do some targeted freewriting. The book to read for guidance on this is The Accidental Genius by Marc Levy.
While getting words on paper is important, it’s potentially damaging to what you write to give yourself the excuse to put ‘crappy words’ on paper. As you’ll see in the next section, I believe the first draft is the most important draft in the writing process.
And, rather than encourage writers to write disposable first drafts, the approach writers should be taking with their first draft is to write something that's as close to the final draft as you can possibly get it.
Not only will that reduce necessary editing time, but aiming for the stars - in terms of writing quality - is a much better and more beneficial approach for any writer to take. That’s irrespective of whether you write nonfiction or fiction.
#4 If You’re Writing In Flow….The First Draft Has the Most Energy.
The main reason that I dislike this Hemingway quote is that writing is a transference from the author to the reader. How you view that transference will be different depending on what kind of writer you are. But it's a transference of energy. Or emotion. Or ideas. Or a combination.
If you're writing in flow and, whether you're writing fiction or nonfiction my belief is you should write in flow, then that transference (of energy or emotion or ideas) should be strongest in your first draft.
While editing is about making the words read better on the page, something I've never seen written about or talked about is the editing challenges of improving the reading experience for your readers, while maintaining the energy/emotion created when writing the first draft.
For me, the editing process is about smoothing the reading experience, taking out words that jar, making vague images swim into focus and so on. Too much editing, and the first draft energy leeches away.
In the full quote from the Samuelson book, Hemingway talks about revising A Farewell To Arm fifty times. For most writers, fifty revisions of a piece of writing is more likely to suck the life out of what you originally wrote than make it better.
Two notes to end this subsection:
This comes back to the importance of finding your unique method of writing. If Hemingway edited A Farewell To Arm fifty times, then he obviously had a method that worked for him. One of your jobs as a writer is to find your unique method of writing.
It’s possible that you edit differently depending on what you are writing. When I write fiction, I know that I edit more, and in more detail, than I do for my non-fiction.
#5 Sidebar: “Out of every ten stories I write, only one is any good and I throw the other nine away."
This isn’t much to do with the original quote that kicks off this Issue. But I wanted to draw attention to it as I’ve never seen anyone cross reference this. There are a couple of important lessons to be taken from this line from the complete quoted section.
5.1 Know Your Process.
One of the hardest parts of being a writer is wading through the mountains of information out there and distilling all the advice down into a method that works for you. If you read interviews with 10 different writers, while there may be things they have in common, there will also be contradictory differences. Your job is to take what works for you and create your own writing method. Writing a certain amount and discarding a hefty percentage might be part of your method. (Though it seems wasteful to me).
A quick story to illustrate how two people pursuing the same path will have difference methods: I was reading an interview with Sting and he was asked how many songs he’d written for a solo album containing 12 or 13 songs. Sting’s answer was 15 songs. The interviewer compared that with Bruce Springsteen, who had written 65 songs for his album of the time and trimmed that down 15.
5.2 Can You Truly Judge Your Work?
According to a quick Google search, Hemingway published around 70 short stories in his lifetime. If he discarded 9 stories for each of those….that means there were over 500 discarded stories. It’s possible that Hemingway’s audience might have preferred some of those stories to the ones Hemingway decided were good and published.
Is it likely that he wrote 500 stories that were discarded? Probably not - I don’t know enough about Hemingway to know if he was speaking literally or metaphorically. But each of us has a finite time available to us…and if you’re discarding significant percentages of what you write my advice is that you work on your process to make your writing better - and make your initial idea selection better - so that this percentage reduces to as close to zero as possible.
The Ride Out
The experience over the last couple of weeks of using dictation to improve my productivity has been illuminating. This article for example was about 65% dictated and the rest was written conventionally. I’ve also found that looking for writing quotes and using them as practice material by turning them into mini essays has been intellectually stimulating and it’s something that I’ll continue to do and post as a ‘Note’ on Substack.
Issue 31
In Issue 31 I’m going to share some thoughts on how you can practice writing “authentically.”