I’ve redone much of chapter one, as of 8/23/2026, and I’ve changed what material was to be chapter two to follow upon some of its key ideas, including the proposition that Hemingway’s famous Iceberg Theory was inspired by his love of crime fiction. Even if you’ve read the earlier attempt, you may wish to reread it now.
This is a work in progress. Feedback is welcome.
The Pratchett Draft
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”
Terry Pratchett
If we take Hemingway seriously, one doesn’t write classic literature by being derivative of the classics that have come before but by stealing from the popular fiction you love. “Steal from… anything that is not a classic, all classics do that,” he said, and his words make this concept foundational. Take from the stories you love, just do it better. Do it great.
Part of that greatness is the quality of the writing itself, but in telling ourselves the story, we often lock ourselves into sentences and paragraphs and pages that feel as if they could exist in no other way. If we’re to bring great writing to popular fiction, we have to break the bottleneck.
The great fantasy writer, Terry Pratchett, told us that the the first draft is just our way of telling ourselves the story. Some very wise writers take Pratchett’s advice literally. Their first draft is little more than a fine-detail listing of everything that happens in a scene, but I can’t work that way. My story needs to rise up from the language. That dependence can become a trap, making it difficult to see beyond what’s written to what can be. We can solve that problem by transforming the passage into a Pratchett draft, that fine-detail list of everything that happens. Take away the language. Allow yourself to begin again.
The Pratchett draft isn’t the equivalent of a Cliff Notes summary which is created so someone can understand the story. It’s created so you can write the story. Spark Notes summarizes the beginning of chapter one of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code this way:
Robert Langdon is asleep in his room at the Ritz in Paris when the concierge calls to say he has an important visitor. Langdon, remembering his lecture on religious symbology earlier that night, figures the visitor is some conservative he offended and tells the concierge to send the guest away. Langdon has a history of being controversial.
But if we give the same passage a Pratchett draft treatment, it looks like this:
Robert Langdon awakes to a ringing telephone, disoriented in a Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a mahogany four-poster bed. A bathrobe on the bedpost reminds him this is the Hotel Ritz Paris. He answers the phone to the concierge telling him he has a visitor who insists his business is urgent. A crumpled flyer on the bedside table reminds him that he had just given a speech earlier that night detailing the pagan symbolism hidden in the Chartres Cathedral, and he assumes his midnight visitor is an offended conservative come to pick a fight.
Dan Brown’s language has largely been stripped away, leaving only the information important to the events of the section. From this Pratchett draft, I can then rewrite the scene, free of the original language.
Out of the darkness, Robert Langdon recognized a fresco, partially hidden behind a Louis XVI armoire and the dead-beetle opulence of the mahogany, four-poster bed on which he lay. From one post, a white bathrobe hanged, condemned and lifeless, emblazoned with the title of the lord of this land: Hotel Ritz Paris. Robert agonized against his broken slumber and answered the phone.
“Many apologies…,” said the concierge. “I know it’s late, Monsieur, but you have a visitor. A matter most grave, he says.”
“Tell him I’ve died,” Langdon said, perhaps before he’d hung up the phone, perhaps after. He’d had his share of midnight guests, riled by Langdon’s lectures that contradicted the strictures of unassailable faith. That night, the speech had been on pagan symbolism hidden within the Chartres Cathedral, and given the options of a shallow debate or a deep sleep, Langdon chose the darkness of death’s near embrace.
The word hanged isn’t technically correct. Normally a bathrobe would be hung, but this one hanged by the neck, condemned and lifeless, part of a pattern of death that runs through the way I’ve chosen to handle the section, not with much subtlety either.
So quickly we’ve abandoned Faulkner and Hemingway to learn from Terry Pratchett, and differing authors will ask what is to be learned from one example or the other. I say neither. Ignorance doesn’t make us better writers.
Faulkner told you not to try to learn from him. Hemingway tells you to steal from others but not from him. If you want to write a classic, that is. A new classic steals from “lesser books,” not the greats.
[They] did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that... But it cannot derive from or resemble a previous classic.
Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway
In context, he’s addressing his opinion of the “great” American writers who came before and takes issue with their failure to come up with something uniquely American. He also takes issue with their unwillingness to capture how people really talk in the language of their literature:
[A]ll these men were gentlemen, or wished to be… They did not use the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language.
After Hemingway talks about writers who were ruined by an overstated praise of their early works, he’s asked about the good writers and says that the only good ones were Henry James [who was born in America and moved to England], Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain.
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway considered Finn a classic, as well it is. One could attempt to draw lines of influence from Twain’s prose to Hemingway’s, but Hemingway would tell you that such efforts are doomed to failure. The American authors who works he admired and from whom he would have considered himself free to steal were Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Here he saw the American hard-boiled detective novel distinguish itself from the British cozy mysteries, the very thing early American classics had failed to do, and Hemingway would have traced that success back to Huckleberry Finn.
He wasn’t only interested in how Americans create an American fiction, of course. He confessed to reading every novel Marie Belloc Lowndes ever wrote, his favorite being the Jack-the-Ripper story, The Lodger, which became Hitchcock’s third feature film (and the first to deserve the title, Hitchcockian). He later devoured the works of Georges Simenon and Ian Fleming.
Hemingway being Hemingway, he thought himself better than these writers, but he thought himself better than everyone and sought to prove it.
William Faulkner shared his love for crime fiction, and Faulkner went beyond a confessed admiration for Hammett, Chandler, and Simenon. He wrote his own crime stories and incorporated their tropes elements into his classic works, but while Hemingway invented the Iceberg Theory and wrote sentences that often reflected the terse nature of hard-boiled detective fiction (and his own, war-time reporting), Faulkner often used crime fiction tropes in his most literary works, while his writing style reached not to Huckleberry Twain for inspiration but another work that was only beginning to be recognized as a classic.
Hemingway’s praise of Huckleberry Finn came in 1935, well into America’s fascination with Moby Dick, which found its popularity in the 1920s and famously inspired authors like Faulkner. Finn was published in 1884; Moby Dick, in 1851.
Green Hills of Africa is Hemingway’s autobiographical account of his 1933 trip to the continent. The context of the quotes come when he’s been away on a fruitless hunt and returns to join the others in a conversation that turns Hemingway to talk about other American writers.
He begins with those who came earlier:
There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making… [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, [Nathaniel] Hawthorne, [and John Greenleaf] Whittier.
He doesn’t mention Melville at all, unless he’s throwing him in with the “and Company” which ends his list, if not mine. His issue with these men is that they wrote too much like what came before, and not just anything that came before, they sound like the classics of a previous generation.
Mark Twain introduced a new voice, one that sounded like the voice of its people. Mind you, Hemingway isn’t alone in this praise. Faulkner called Twain the father of American literature; Faulkner just didn’t write like him, usually, and if we take Hemingway at his word, neither did Hemingway, except for objective narration, clarity of syntax, and use of colloquial language and dialect.
Hemingway eventually praised Melville, Faulkner’s great inspiration. In 1949, Hemingway wrote to his publisher saying that Melville was one of the few writers he was still trying to beat. A year later, he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, the last major work he would publish in his lifetime.
Through Hemingway and Faulkner, the tension between Mark Twain and Herman Melville defined American literary styles in the twentieth century, culminating and synthesized in the work of Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s work strikes me as a less hopeful, less cheerful Twain, and without the cheating, as Hemingway would say.
…Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where … Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had.
As illustrative of American literature as the Melville / Twain tension may be, it’s not a complete picture without a consideration of Edgar Allan Poe whose work was the headwater of the genre explosion, which reminds us that we need not focus on a supposed division between literary and genre fiction. While Hemingway’s snobbery has not entirely vanished from the earth, more room has been made among the classics to include the great genre writers, including those admired by Hemingway and Faulkner.
What influences should we draw from as writers? It’s easy to lock Hemingway’s ideas into the limits of his time. Postmodernism and metamodernism hadn’t yet begun, both of which elevate pastiche as an art form, but before any of that, Hemingway championed the very contemporary idea of taking from popular and beloved works that academia might never welcome into their canon. Draw from the writing you love to read, even if it’s not respected among your peer group. It has something to teach you about creating passion within your readers, yes, but to hear him say it, this is how all great works are born.
We don’t elevate our work by trying to write a book like the great books we admire but by bringing highly refined skills to the types of popular fiction that move you most. Be inspired by what’s come before, not limited by it. Take a section from your rough draft, something that doesn’t feel right but resists correction. Until now, the words have been sacred and locked in place. However terrible they may be, they persist. Summarize the section in detail, capturing all the action but only as a plain series of events.
From that Pratchett draft, write again.
When you’re done, read what you’ve written and look for motifs. Draw them out of hiding. Complete them. They don’t have to be brazen, but use them to give your scene structure and build themes that point to something more.
A theme is an idea exemplified throughout a story. A motif is a concept repeated in words only, rather than action. Death is not exemplified in the Brown rewrite, merely referenced. The two concepts often become blurry as motifs support the themes.
Everything you just read in that last paragraph is going to rub certain English professors wrong. Let me say it again but this time get it technically right: theme is an abstract idea; motifs are the concrete objects that build that idea.
Certain varieties of story exist where the theme’s abstract idea is not exemplified in the story’s action. Beyond those varieties, however, my conviction is that concrete repetition and abstract ideas have greater importance when they’re exemplified within the story’s action. Death is an appropriate motif for the opening of The Da Vinci Code because Langdon is about to be confronted with the death of the man who was supposed to meet him for drinks. The motif reinforces the action of the story. It builds conceptual momentum, but I also readily endorse motifs and themes that contradict the action of the story. That contradiction builds ironic tension.
Take all of it. Steal from the fiction you love, but learn to do it better.
— Thaddeus Thomas