Ernest Hemingway boxed set of his most popular titles (Scribners)
There’s been a lot of recent speculation and fretting among authors and editors about the impacts of AI. Many of us have been using writing-aid tools that weren’t labeled as such, and perhaps we never noticed those algorithms getting progressively smarter. Now the debate is out in the open, along with a flurry of new product introductions and enhancements aimed directly at writers.
I’ll make this prediction, which is likely to be a reassurance for journalists and an annoyance or worse for fiction writers: AI bots do and will continue to encourage and train writers to write like Hemingway – that is, in clear, simple prose. Hemingway was a journalist who turned to fiction. His contribution to expository writing can’t be understated. Many journalists at the turn of the century delighted in their flowery prose, as did novelists such as Edith Wharton and her friend and colleague Henry James. Hemingway’s advice to keep it straightforward and simple has been a blessing to clear expression ever since. But because he carried that spare style into his novels, several generations of authors dumbed down their artistic expression.
I believe no one ever accused Hemingway’s reportorial style of sounding like poetry when read aloud.
Even before AI editorial tools such as Grammarly and ProWritingAid, Microsoft Word would report on your document’s reading-level scores. In the recent past, the general rule was that expository writing for adults should be aimed at the tenth-grade reading level. This was true for The New York Times and for textbooks, not only at the high-school but also university level. Notoriously and deliberately, USA Today aimed at the seventh grade.
You don’t need a bot for the basic formula to write like Hemingway for readers who expect plain prose:
- Avoid sentences with more than two independent clauses.
- Use words with no more than three syllables.
- Use active voice.
- Make the takeaway statement from a paragraph the first, or topic, sentence – not the last one.
Some book editors will add another all-encompassing rule for fiction: Show, don’t tell. This is useful advice for novelists and their agents who want screenwriters to adapt their books to the screen. I would direct those critics to Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1, a novel which is all telling in paragraphs that sometimes exceed a page in length. Bad writing? Apparently the judges of the Booker Prize didn’t think so. Auster’s admittedly daring experiment made the prize short list, and in 2017 several newspapers named it best book of the year.
All of the editorial bots will try to force your writing into Hemingway’s mold. And if you’re writing a business report or a news article or an instruction manual, your readers will benefit, and your arguments will be less obscure.
Even when you’re writing fiction, book agents and editorial staff at publishing houses may encourage you to do the same. Perhaps agents think the interns who read manuscripts on the first round read at the fifth-grade level. And it may well be that the publishing houses think the audience for a genre work will be broader if posted reviews don’t complain the book is “hard to read.”
Consider, though, the example of authors whom other authors admire. For example, I’m reading Less by Andrew Sean Greer. This Pulitzer-prize-winning novel is written in a style that’s distinctly Greer’s, and he’s bringing armloads and carloads of flowery stuff. I shudder to imagine the result if he’d passed his manuscript through Grammarly and simply hit “Accept All.”
Preacher Evan Wycliff is a reluctant investigator because people come to him with problems no one else cares to solve, and he has an obsessively curious mind about why bad things happen to good people.
