by Tom Hunter

Created on: December 27, 2007

Anyone who has set off to write a novel or even a short story will eventually confront this question: what is a story? There are many books available, those that were published in the past fifty years and those that more recently entered print.

As a budding author, you may commence to write a story or what you think is a story by trying to relate an anecdote that you heard. Unless you are quite fortunate, this approach does not yield very good fruit. The explanation of why this doesn't is as mysterious as the entire writing process. One cannot go to a single place and find the answer, as one could hope to do with an encyclopedia. Rather, one must investigate the answer and attempt to get close to the solution.

Ernest Hemingway's Advice: "Don't Describe, Invent"

I began my life as a writer back in 1983, when I was 18 years old. I first began by reading Ernest Hemingway's "First 49" short stories. I was amazed at how effective they were. I dissected them sentence by sentence, trying to figure out by the arrangement of clauses, the control over concrete verbs and the avoidance of adjectives what he had accomplished. I did not arrive at an obvious answer and in fact just got more confused. I turned to the many biographies and analytical works that strove to understand what Hemingway was trying to achieve. I accomplished the same thing I would have if I had just read each of the stories over and over a hundred times. I achieved a critical close reading by reading these biographies and critical analyses.

More importantly, though, I heard related a lot of the comments Hemingway himself made about his writing life. He was always making pronouncements that I did not understand and that frustrated me. One of the first ones I heard was: "Don't describe, Invent." Well, I thought. What the devil does that mean? It took me about two years of my own writing to start to understand what he was meaning by this cryptic comment. Hemingway was describing the process of story writing. When a writer tries to create a story out of something that actually happened to them, they are apt to describe what actually happened. That might work except that a person's imagination-driven by their subconscious-is always limited by what actually happened to them. Their imagination can go no further than the real events. If the writer does not base their story on a real event, then what we just described (description) is not an option. If the writer makes up a story from whole cloth, then they are

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