We’re leaving Hemingway writing trends behind — and that’s a good thing

Modern English writing trends enforce a Hemingway dogma that is far out of step with human experience. Fortunately, we are leaving all that behind. I hope. I think we are. Aren’t we?

All of us amateur writers have heard things like:

• Don’t use purple prose (and, swear to God, if you rhyme, we’re getting pitchforks)
• Don’t use too many adverbs (you get one ‘‘-LY’’ token per page)
• Don’t ever use a big word if a smaller word will do
• Be concise and be brief and be minimal
• Cut anything unnecessary

These modern English writing trends result in manicured gardens. The paths are edged. The concrete is swept. The lawn is neatly trimmed. There are no weeds on the grounds – what are weeds? If there are blossoms, they are sensible. There are no unruly flashes of color. There is no purple (anything purple is absolutely outlawed). If you write a word that ends in an L and a Y together, side by side, a warrant is issued for your arrest. You are put in prison immediately. For an L and a Y to be together in the end – such a thing cannot be, it is an illicit relationship! And they are often seen wearing purple clothes!

Yes, we think – we thinkers-in-English, we readers-of-English – all is as it should be. Every sentence is four words at most. Only the shortest words are acknowledged as legitimate. Every page is as naked as possible. Sentimentality? Burned at the stake. Anything that smacks of romance? Impaled. No – actually, such writing sins are not destroyed; all sins are kept preserved, pinned in a glass box, memorialized forever so that they may serve as warnings. 

A dark and stormy night? Ugh, we declare, that is ‘marvelously awful.’ It is so awful it ought to be mocked with an award. 

We can thank Ernest Hemingway. No – it’s not his fault, not at all, the blame is ours and ours alone – for like children, like fanboys and fangirls, we glommed onto him and never let go. Who decided? I don’t know who decided, but they decided it for all of us – and until we rebel things won’t change. (And thanks be to God that other languages did not follow us – we might yet be saved.)

We must do everything like this person and never ever do anything different ever! Even though it is Hemingway who is the outlier – we must never think of that! We must pretend forever and always that there is a Proper Way to Write! Anyone who does otherwise is Stupid, is Profane, is a Heretic, is – gasp! – a Bad Writer! Writing – writing must be Minimal. Writing must be Unadorned.

Is all that over? 

It’s done, right? That subservient dedication to the minimal, concise, dry prose which, we are assured, nobly conceals, almost entirely, the quiet desperation of the sufferer – who suffers succinctly, as is proper? 

I feel like most of what I read doesn’t follow those rules. Most of the books people tell me about don’t seem to follow those rules. It… it seems to be over?

If it is – and I hope we’re not declaring victory prematurely – all I can say is, Don’t let the door hitcha on the way out, bud!

Architecture and interior design, thanks be to Heaven, moved on from this obsession with ‘‘less-is-more’’ modernism a long time ago. Practical, no-nonsense, boring buildings are now, rightly, mocked – because they are big rectangles. That’s all they are. Big, boring-ass rectangles. ‘‘Less is a bore,’’ said Robert Venturi – and the Modern empire crumbled. And Hemingway’s style – which worked beautifully for him – was never meant to be a solution for everybody writing in English.

Writing ought to be chaos. Writing ought to be the wind obliterating your hair, the printing press misfiring, the sea stealing your glasses, a bug flying into your mouth mid-sentence – errors and mistranslations and thoughts taken ought of context! It ought to be humble, but bombastic in its humility. Funny, but cringe – cringe-seeking. That ”dark and stormy” intro – I love it, I’m on board straightaway! Purple prose? We think in purple! That’s the tinge of our thoughts, of our memories – purple, not sepia! We exaggerate, we thrill in exaggeration – no one has ever recounted a story of their deeds precisely, for we would yawn if they did! The human experience is colorful. The human experience is even – God Forbid! – a little purple most of the time! 

As for adverbs – why did our ancestors invent adverbs if we weren’t meant to use them? And we’re people, not pine trees – we are flighty and inaccurate, we overdo things, we use stuff in the wrong places, we say ‘stuff’ instead of something more specific. Our lives are not manicured – why do we pretend our writing has to be so clean, so sterile, so controlled? We are mostly weeds, we are mostly typos! We are mostly bad decisions! We are doughy, we are shaped like potatoes, we are not Greek statues! We aren’t clean, orderly, predictably trimmed gardens – we are riotous fireworks of flowers, our blossoms sag and thrill and exult and wither, our bushes are out of control! 

And why would we use a small word, if a big one isn’t busy? Excising big words made sense back when we were pretending to be smarter than we are – but aren’t we done with that already? We’re all dolty dum-dums, we know that, everyone knows that, there’s no one to impress, we have nothing to prove – so why not bring back big words? Big words are funny! Big words are like walking around outside in your least flattering outfit, in your worst pajamas. (Do we even have outfits that are flattering anymore?) ‘‘Insubordinate and churlish!’’ Key and Peele say – and it’s funny because the words are big, because they’re being naughty, because they’re using words we ought not say!

And avoid repetition – why? Repetition is human. Hebrew poetry – think of the Proverbs, the Psalms! They are mostly couplets, little linked pairs – the subtle and not-so-subtle repetition is key. The Odyssey, any oral storytelling – phrases are repeated for easy memorization. Words are beautiful technology, they are wondrous – but words, as we all know, as we all intuit, are a ‘‘sparse-meshed net.’’ They don’t capture much – and so we speak in couplets, we think in linked pairs. It is an old human strategy. It is a profound witness to the apophatic nature of reality. 

‘The lizard’s tail was wiggly, the little guy’s tail was squiggly!’ a child might say. Be concise and be brief – why? Why not say both? Why not cast two nets, so people can better see, by what eludes our grasp, the meaning in the shape of the void? Are we worried about people being in a hurry? People in a hurry don’t read. We don’t need to give two farts about people in a hurry. If somebody is sitting down to read a book, they best buckle up. If it’s good enough for Kohelet, it’s good enough for us. There’s a time for writing a haiku, and there’s a time for writing odysseys; there’s a time for writing The Old Man and the Sea, and there’s a time for writing Ulysses. Say things twice. Say things doubly. Say things thrice. Or say things sextuply. Repetition is human; it’s sometimes funny; it’s sometimes sexy; it’s sometimes wise. 

All of this, all of the above, is going to war against a straw man. I know. I’m fighting against windmills from a hundred years ago, windmills that might not have existed at all. I have nothing against Hemingway; he’s a master of the craft. I rail only against the thoughtless molding of one path into the path for all – though, at the same time, I know nobody really really follows the simplistic advice at the top of the page. But, for whatever reason, such advice is wildly popular. Amateur writers hear it from our left and from our right – and if giving overly broad advice is a little foolish, then it deserves an overly broad and foolish response like this one from time to time. 

I say the whole trend seems over because plenty of writers shred all of these accepted wisdoms, writing ‘‘mistakes,’’ writing so purple it’s almost lunacy – just generally doing whatever they like. Writers like Anna Burns and George Saunders and Dave Eggers and – there are a thousand, ten thousand, trillions of examples you can think of. 

(Ah – and what of the prepositions we weren’t supposed to end sentences with? Never something we needed to worry about. But we can let the grammarian fundamentalists have this one – they need something to fire them up.)

You know what, though? 

I ought to apologize to Hemingway; he didn’t mean for any of this. That award I linked to above is just being playful; I think it’s a very funny idea. I even ought to apologize to the givers-of-advice, who are just trying to help amateur writers like me find their way in the baffling, labyrinthine world of literature. I should even think a little more about the writing trends I’ve been blasting – because if I ever want to go from being an amateur writer to a published author, I should probably be following some of this ‘‘silly writing advice’’ after all!