See, the economy of Ernest Hemingway’s writing is a thing of beauty.
His language is stripped of all the fluff.
No adverbs, for example.
First of all, it’s clear. But the result of this type of fiction writing is that it forces you to use your imagination.
Here’s an example from the book referrenced below:
In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work.
Do you see it?
(There is an entire writing app based on Hemingway’s brevity.)
The Sun Also Rises is, after all, a fantastic read…
From the American tent I admire the workaday but forceful prose of Theodore Dreiser, and of course the brilliance and economy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and the early stories. That book, as various writers have pointed out, is one of the most contagious of modern times. If you work in prose fiction and you read The Sun Also Rises it is very hard not to imitate it.
-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)