Hemingway's cure to stuckness (#70)

If you don't know which direction to go- start here.

It’s reassuring to know that even the all-time greats struggled.

John Quincy Adams was a lost, struggling attorney twenty five years before he was president. Ray Dalio listened to Tony Robbins tapes in his driveway, afraid to face his wife when as his business nearly went bankrupt.

The same was true for Ernest Hemingway.

In his mid-20s, the unknown foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star was attempting to write his first novel—something he thought unlikely just a year or so prior. As he wrote in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his time figuring out writing in Paris:

It was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph.

But Hemingway learned a trick. One that helped him get started when he couldn’t figure out which way to go. And that trick has helped me move forward, not just when writing, but when working on any long, hard thing.¹

And it’s the subject of today’s OGT.

One true sentence

But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made.

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.

It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written....

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

The OGT: Start with small truths, then expand

There are two lessons I take from Hemingway’s self-talk—one explicit, one implied.

Lesson #1 (explicit): Start with the known

The explicit is obvious: when you are struggling with direction, whether it’s blog post, a discovery, or maybe even your life, start here: with the small, simple knowns.

That’s how, for example, Michelle Obama completely changed her career, and became counsel to Mayor of Chicago. She wrote out what she wanted to be, what she knew, her skills, and her connections, and started at square one.

At a more advanced level, you can take what’s true and get to new territory with one, crucial question: if this is true, what else is true?

1(a) Expansion - If this is true…

This is how novelists imagine worlds, it’s how scientists make new discoveries, and it’s even how comedians come up with jokes.

A comedian has an insight. For example, Jerry Seinfeld’s bird would fly towards a mirror, think another bird is coming at it, and fly into it’s reflection. He writes down that oddity, then takes the next step—if this is true, then what else? In this case, Seinfeld said, wait a second, shouldn’t it try to avoid what it thinks is another bird? There’s your joke.

Einstein read deep on on Newtonian mechanics and Maxwellian electromagnetics, and saw the known conflict that existed. Einstein then asked, if this is true, what else is true? And, as Carlo Rovelli teaches, in one of the most elegant books I’ve ever read, discovered that there wasn’t a field of gravity and then a separate electromagnetic field—they were one and the same.

Lesson #2 (implicit): Learn more

But what happens if you don’t know any more truths?

Say Hemingway writes the stories he wants to about the interesting things he knows, then what do you do? My take: you need to learn more.

The way Hemingway did that was not as much through books—though he learned much through them—but through experiences. His books are all based on things he knew because he’d done them. He’d been on the war front in France (A Farewell To Arms), he’d roadtripped to Pamplona (The Sun Also Rises), and fished in Cuba (Old Man and The Sea).

So, your first and most likely solution is to start with what’s already known. The small truths that you’ve experienced, or that the world has recognized. From there, you can ask: if this is true, what else is?

On rarer but probably more disconcerting occasions, the answer might not be what you know, but what you still don’t. At that point, another truth might occur to you:

Maybe, you need to get outside.

1. Get your mind out of the gutter