How Much Does a Hemingway?

 

One of the most valuable books I ever read was The New Oxford Guide to Writing by Thomas S. Kane. It’s a fantastic book. It gave me a completely different perspective on literature in general. Among other things, Kane breaks down the writing techniques for which certain famous authors are well known: Abraham Lincoln being the master of embellishment; Twain, exaggeration; and Hemingway, the mistake. For me, this last technique made reading and writing far less intimidating and far more interesting. 

The idea that you could bend or break the rules of writing to convey information was liberating. It felt a bit like Neo bending or breaking the rules of the Matrix. Hemingway, for example, used run-on sentences to indicate that the narrator was in a dreamy or whimsical state of mind. Here’s an example from A Farewell to Arms:

That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. 

Byron does precisely this, breaking the rules of puzzle writing to convey information. The mistake Byron used as a hint was to list the instructions out of order. For example, “Seek the columns” should come first, but it’s near the end. “In a rectangular plot,” should come near the end, but instead, it appears near the beginning. Byron is telling us, through these ordinal mistakes, that executing the steps of the puzzle in the right order is part of the challenge. This questioning the order of the instructions combined with questioning the original assumptions was what led me to figure this out (in my opinion, of course).