The line from Ernest Hemingway — that “The first draft of anything is shit” — wasn’t hyperbole. And it wasn’t advice to comfort his inferiors. There are some 47 alternative endings for Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, written by his hand alone. Hemingway rewrote the first part of the book, by his own count, more than 50 times.
When he was asked by Paris Review what it was that had stumped him, Hemingway replied, simply, “Getting the words right.” In the ending he did choose, we see another classic Hemingway quote — “To be successful in writing, use short sentences.” — in action. He cut pages then paragraphs to land on a single sentence as the ending: “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.”
We find the same belief shared among many of the greats. As Shakespeare put, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Here are 35 great writers with similar thoughts on the importance of brevity in writing:
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” ? Stephen King, On Writing
“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” — George Orwell
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.” ? Friedrich Nietzsche
“The shorter and the plainer the better.” — Beatrix Potter
“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.” ? Mark Twain
“All I’m writing is just what I feel, that’s all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.” ? Jimi Hendrix
“I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.” ? Truman Capote
“Like all magnificent things, it’s very simple.” ? Natalie Babbitt
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac
“Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” ? Samuel Johnson
“Beginning writers tend to be verbose. We can’t tell the difference between an essential detail and an inessential one. We’re like golden retrievers romping through Storyland, and pretty much every damn thing we see is a squirrel.” — Chuck Palahniuk
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” — Thomas Jefferson
“One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.” — Toni Morrison
“Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.” — Charles Bukowski
“A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who instead of aiming a single stone at an object takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.” — Samuel Johnson
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.” — Ernest Hemingway
“I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.” — Jane Austen
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” ? Strunk & White, The Elements of Style
“When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter. Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.” ? Strunk & White, The Elements of Style
“Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.” ? William Zinsser, On Writing Well
“Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.” ? William Zinsser, On Writing Well
“You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.” — Ernest Hemingway
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo da Vinci
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” — Mark Twain
“Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction.” — Albert Einstein
“Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.” — Matthew Arnold
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” ? Henry David Thoreau
“Use familiar words—words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvellously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.” — James J. Kilpatrick
“I do not over-intellectualise the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.” —Tom Clancy
“I never study style; all that I do is try to get the subject as clear as I can in my own head, and express it in the commonest language which occurs to me.” — Charles Darwin
“The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.” — George Eliot
“Anyone who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.” — H.W. Fowler
“The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.” — Robert Heinlein
“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.” ? Thomas Mann
“The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.” — Hippocrates