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The title above suggests a certain degree of mastery: Only an expert can tell the difference between the best and worst advice you can give to an aspiring writer. At least that’s the default way of thinking about the subject.
In my opinion, the opposite is true. As a beginner experimenting with written content, I can recognize a bad instruction when I see it. You can call it a gut feeling. I’m talking about the type of advice that sucks all the fun out of writing and turns it into a chore that you can’t wait to finish. And the worst one I’ve seen comes from Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961).
In “With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba,” Arnold Samuelson recounts the following writing advice given by Hemingway:
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Don’t ever imitate anybody. All style is, is the awkwardness of a writer in stating a fact. If you have a way of your own, you are fortunate, but if you try to write like somebody else, you’ll have the awkwardness of the other writer as well as your own.
They say that imitation is the best form flattery, but it’s also the best form of learning — something that Hemingway clearly didn’t know. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he also said the following to Samuelson, his young protégé:
I rewrote “A Farewell to Arms” at least fifty times. 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.
Indeed, the first draft of anything is shit, but so is going over your work “at least fifty times.” If you want to hate your own writing, try to make it “perfect.” Hemingway was a literary genius, but he wasn’t a very good teacher, in my opinion, of course.
“With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba” is well worth a read. For the best writing advice you can give to a beginner, check out Stephen King, who said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” Then, revisit Jack Kerouac’s 30 rules of writing.
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