By Dorothy Seehausen

January, 2026

I was scanning the book titles at my favorite thrift store the other day when I came across Ernest Hemingway On Writing, Edited by Larry W. Phillips. I’ve become infatuated with this art form I am attempting to master. There are so many layers to be discovered and applied to the final product. You have the Hero’s Journey, character development, plot, theme, rising action, falling action, climax, denouement, genre….whew! So many rabbit holes for us to fall into.

What makes Phillips’ book so interesting is it’s a collection of letters written by Hemingway to his friends and family. “I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world..boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin.” Excerpt from a 1933  letter to Mrs. Paul Pfeiffer (Pauline), his second wife. Is the famous writer giving us a tip on wordiness? Know your vocabulary and use it judiciously.

            In 1953 he wrote to Charles Poore, editor of the Hemingway Reader,  “There’s no rule on how it is to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly. Sometimes it is like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

I never thought about my own writing quite explosively. Perhaps this is Hemingway’s way of explaining the deep dive into the editing process necessary to push back everything that we don’t want in order to get what we do want. Certainly, as Hemingway puts it, every writer needs a sort of poop detector, like a sculptor chipping away at everything that the final piece is not supposed to look like.

I have found that most advice on writing has the same formula for success: Whatever you start you must finish. “You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless…go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.” This advice comes from a selected letter to his mentor F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1929, with whom Hemingway had a contentious relationship once he rose to fame.

I have personally never been a Hemingway fan. For inspiration I lean more toward Patterson, Nora Lofts, and the satire of Mad Magazine. But every author has something to tell us. Every writer has something to learn. Here we are, over a hundred years later, still looking to Hemingway for tips of the trade.

Happy Writing from the Frog!