True Hemingway
August 4th, 2011Someone in my twitter stream–I don’t know who–posted this Ernest Hemingway quote this morning…
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
…and my first gut response was– “Shit.” That’s the truest sentence I know. At which point I literally laughed out loud, realizing I may have ventured a little too far toward cynical.
For some reason this incident has remained stuck in my head all day, so to exorcise it, I’ll offer instead an even more perfect sentence, not written by me, but by Hemingway himself:
“Isn’t it pretty to think so.”
Posted on: Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 9:59 pm
Categories: Writing.
August 4th, 2011 at 11:17 pm
Isn’t anything we say about what we are perceiving the truest thing we could say in that moment? Is there any other kind of truest thing? To me, this advice says “be honest with yourself in every moment, and do not judge.”
August 5th, 2011 at 3:27 am
See? I told you I was cynical. But to me, the first quote is either stating there is some magic phrase that will make everything work if only you get it right, or that each and every sentence one writes must be studied and parsed to decide if it’s the “true” interpretation of the target sentiment–really the opposite of not judging. But that’s just my take, and I have no idea what the context of the first quote is.
The second quote, on the other hand, is one of the great closing lines, and a very useful gem to pull out on occasion.