Hemingway's Five Tips

Ernest Hemingway offered five tips for authors (which might be more accurately called "five tips for authors who want to write like Ernest Hemingway"):

1. Use short sentences.
William Faulkner and Jame Fenimore Cooper don't make the cut.
From A Farewell to Arms: "That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had to learn."

2. Use short opening paragraphs.
From The Snows of Kilimanjaro: "'The marvelous thing is that it's painless,' he said."

3. Use vigorous English.
Show muscle, passion, pain, dirt.
From The Old Man and Sea: "The next shark that came was a single shovelnose. He came like a pig to the trough if a pig had a mouth so wide that you could put your head in it."

4. Be positive, not negative.
This is Hemingway, so the rule obviously has to do with style, not content.
Hemingway would not have written: "She was not entirely devoid of a certain comeliness." He would have written — and did — "She was still a good-looking woman, she had a pleasant body ... she was not pretty, but he liked her face."
Example from In Our Time: "When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn't take off with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with their forelegs broken pushed over in the shallow water. It was a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business."
Note, incidentally, that Hemingway didn't care for apostrophes, reflective of his aggressive, impatient nature. Pauses projected weakness and would have undercut his raw prose.

5. Never have only four rules.
Hemingway here signals that the number of rules, even the rules themselves, are essentially arbitrary. Use or discard his as you see fit.