Hemingway Week: Stop Writing Before Your Battery is Completely Discharged

If you discharge the entire battery in your car, it’s rendered useless. It will never hold a charge again. You always need to make sure you have a little life in there. So it is with writing. Writers have little batteries that are prone to running out. You’ve got to make sure you always leave a little charge behind. That’s why Hemingway said, “The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time… Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work.”

The subconscious is extraordinarily good at writing while you’re doing other things. It will generate your next bout of content while you’re washing dishes or babysitting an annoying toddler. Wait until you’re fresh. Sleep. Do some yoga. Go to work. Let your brain do its work. The next time you sit down to that page, you will magically have something to say.

There’s another reason Hemingway gave this piece of advice: If you stop at an interesting point of the story, you’ll be more motivated to return to the page. Save some juice. More importantly, don’t strive for perfection. Hemingway once rewrote a book 50 times. So must we, but that’s a good thing. It means we can treat the first draft as a wild and crazy ride. We can experiment. We can put down what we want to see.

“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.”

Playing keeps your battery charged. Writing first for yourself will achieve the same. You’re just laying the foundation for a book that is yet to happen, so write for yourself. Edit for your readers. Second drafts are a special kind of hell, but they’re slog work. On a creative level, they are far less challenging than your initial writing. You must play. If a first draft feels like a slog, it’s probably because you’re trying to write a second draft when you’re supposed to be working on the first.

This week, we're covering Hemingway's writing advice, so this is the perfect time to start reading him if you haven't already. For me, the easiest book he ever wrote was A Movable Feast. It's short. It's entertaining. It won't take more than a few days to read.