The ‘Heming Way’ is a Clean, Well-lighted Sentence

Every writer I know has gone through a Hemingway phase. Some of us never recover!

You start out thinking he’s overrated. He’s some guy your high school English teacher quoted to sound deep. Then one day you reread Hills Like White Elephants and realize you’ve been trying to write like that for years. The story’s about abortion, sure, but it’s also about how people talk around the things that scare them. And that’s what Hemingway did better than anyone. He made silence sound so incredibly loud.

As a writer who’s spent most of his time building worlds — sometimes with dragons, sometimes just with very emotionally damaged people — I’ve learned over the years that Hemingway’s power lied somewhere between simplicity and restraint. Two things that seem similar but really aren’t. His work is simple in the sense that it features familiar people, places, and things without overcomplicating them. But his restraint is in how he hides those complications from you, so you can determine what they are for yourself.

Icebergs.

Hemingway’s famous “Iceberg Theory” is a minimalist’s worldview. You show ten percent of what you know and let the reader feel the rest. The catch is that you have to actually know the ninety percent you’re hiding.

In fantasy writing, we do the opposite all the time. Sometimes we even mess up and drop the entire world bible on a single page before anyone even knows why they should care. But Hemingway would give you one image (a river, a gun, a bar at closing time) and make you feel the weight of a whole world living before and after it.

That’s what I like to chase when I write anything from fantasy to literary to rom-com. I chase the part of the iceberg no one sees.

Short sentences aren’t the point.

People say Hemingway wrote “short sentences,” like he did it out of obligation or basic branding. But he wasn’t short for the sake of brevity. He was precise. Efficient. Every line moves like a heartbeat, down to the syllable. It’s steady and calm and (when needed) flatlining for effect.

Outside it was getting dark. The streetlight came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.

— The Killers

Total control of the pace. He knew how to make five sentences feel like a thousand.

Writers today could use some more of that. You don’t need to strip your voice bare, but you do need to stop apologizing for being clear and dare I say it precise. The reader doesn’t need you to prove how well you write, they need you to prove you see the world honestly.

Hemingway today.

If Hemingway were alive in 2025 or whenever you’re reading this, he wouldn’t be hunting big game or getting into bar fights in Paris. He’d be sitting in a diner at midnight watching two people scroll through their phones instead of talking. He’d write about nurses, factory workers, sex workers, veterans, and other people straight out of a Sean Baker film.

He’d probably still write about wars, but they’d be smaller wars. Lonelier wars. Wars fought between the self you are and the one you pretend to be online.

What we can still learn.

Hemingway reminds us that clarity is not the enemy of depth. He believed the clean line was the moral line. He was far from pure, obviously, and that came from him understanding how easily emotions can lie and manipulate.

You can apply that mentality anywhere. Writing epic fantasy? Cut one page of description and make the surviving details sing. Writing romance? Let one unsent text say more than an entire chapter of longing.

What Hemingway left us is more challenge than formula/blueprint. Say less. Mean more. Let silence carry whatever’s left.

Why I keep coming back to him.

When I’m editing other people’s work (including one recent submission for Cetera Magazine), I can always tell when a writer has read either too much Hemingway or not much of him at all. You can’t copy him, don’t even try. But you can understand and trust what he trusted. He trusted readers. He trusted rhythm. He was so confident in his work that he practically designed his stories to be reread if you actually wanted the full meaning.

So if you’re stuck on your next story, whatever the genre, please stop worrying about plot twists or worldbuilding minutiae and how “original” your theme is. Write one clean, well-lighted sentence. Then another. Keep carving at that tree until what’s left is a message we can read.

That’s how Hemingway wrote, after all. And it’s how, I suspect, he’d still be writing today. Somewhere in Key West, perhaps, grumbling about Substack but secretly checking the comments anyway.

What I’m up to.

Appreciate you reading this far. Since my last entry, I’ve been hard at work with early submissions for October. At Cetera, we’re full swing into our “October of Horror,” where we’re publishing new horror short stories every week, plus a bonus ghost tale for our paid members. It’s called The Ghost Census and the artwork you saw at the beginning is what I illustrated for it using Procreate. I’m quite proud of it, but for those of you who aren’t paid members, we put out The Morrow Twins by Natalia Emmons last week, and we have a new free hororr hitting this Thursday called Housekeeping for the Dead by yours truly.

With much of the year already figured out in terms of what we’re publishing through the holidays, I have an opportunity to put some more time into novels. The problem is that I have several ongoing projects competing for my writing affections. If I had to narrow it down, the competition would be between a sprawling epic fantasy romance and a contemporary romantic comedy satire. The latter is over halfway done and is therefore more tempting to finish up, while the fantasy is certainly a work in progress…

No updates on The Pixar Theory book, except to say that proposing nonfiction to agents is a real challenge when you’re simultaneously known for creative fiction. I’m really struggling there, though I am reaching a point where I only have a few literary agents left considering my latest finished work at the manuscript phase (which simply means they requested the manuscript after I queried them).

I could be doing a lot more work in regards to pitching my work to agents, but I’m so enamored by self publishing and running Cetera that it’s gone way down my list of priorities, truth be told. Well, except for the Pixar Theory book of course.

I’ll leave you with a recommendation. Go read “The Killers” by Ernest Hemingway and see if you can find some avenues of commonality between his time when writing it and your time while reading it. Who knows? Maybe you’ll come out of it feeling inspired to write something new.

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