Hemingway Had No Rules—Why You Don’t Either

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Writers are constantly told there’s a right way to structure chapters, paragraphs, and point of view—but is that actually true? In this episode, Zena Dell Lowe explores why great storytelling isn’t about following formulas and why clarity always matters more than cleverness. This episode is for writers who feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure whether their stylistic choices are working, and want permission to trust the story they’re telling.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] okay. So the question is, what's the appropriate number of, I don't know, paragraphs per chapter, or how long should a chapter be or, or how short should the paragraphs be?

[00:00:11] I mean, there's all sorts of these logistical questions, right? And what I would say is there's no one right answer. It just depends on your story and the way that you're writing it. Ernest Hemingway made a living out of writing in short. Succinct sentences without flowery language. It was revolutionary back in the day.

[00:00:30] That was his style and it worked for his books. So anything is possible. What I will say is this. Here's the real rule of thumb, Here's what's behind it. Well, two things. One is. If it works, it works. But number two is it works if your audience isn't confused and they're following it. Now, mind you, there are times when we are deliberately allowing our audience to be confused.

[00:00:56] Like if you've ever read Ender's Game, Ender's Game has these chapters. At the beginning of each chapter, there's usually a page or two of a dialogue exchange in italics between two characters. That is so cryptic and we know. We know it's about ender, but we don't know who's saying it. We don't know what's really going.

[00:01:16] We're very confused by it in the beginning, but it's very intriguing and yet we're, it's also not just esoteric jargon, like we might not know who's saying it or why, but we're getting the gist of what's being said and we're foreshadowing what's gonna happen in the chapter. I mean, we're still not completely lost.

[00:01:35] And yet it was a tool that was deliberately being used by the author as a storytelling mechanism that then by the end of it, we do get it. And now everything makes sense. I mean, based on where that story goes, it's like, oh, I get it. And we finally under. Stand what those little vignettes were at the beginning of each chapter.

[00:01:58] Definitely a stylistic choice would not have worked for every book, but it certainly worked for that one and it worked beautifully. So every story can have its own style, if you will. It just depends on what's right for your story, and that's where you have to figure that out. By the way, this is why some stories, like some authors start trying to write first person, very popular right now, by the way, to write in first person.

[00:02:23] Very difficult though to write an entire novel in first person because then you can't just cut away to other characters and other chapters and see what's going on there. That's why third person omniscient is generally speaking the easiest in terms of storytelling. Maybe not the easiest in terms of.

[00:02:40] Style, but the easiest in terms of making sure you can get all the information in for your audience that you want them to be reading. It means that nothing is off limits, but if it's only written in first person, now you have to have a character that overhears something or who figures something out.

[00:02:54] They can't. You can't just cut away and have two characters have a scene over here. If it's in first person and your main character's over here, how are they gonna know and how, you know? Because everything is coming to us through the character. So all this to say, this is why so many writers might start out that way, but then they're a second or third novels switch to a different narrative style.

[00:03:15] Because it becomes difficult to sustain when they have more information they need to convey than they can through first person. So anyway, you get the point. The question is what's right for your story. And then on top of that, does it take the audience out of it or are we able to stay in it? Are we tracking enough, even if it's deliberately.

[00:03:37] Opaque or obtuse and not completely clear. Is it clear enough that we're just intrigued by it and we're eager to keep going rather than checking out because we're just lost? You never, ever wanna cause confusion. And by the way, this is just, I just had an article come out about this in on the right conversation where my whole thing is you want to avoid confusing your audience.

[00:04:02] At all costs, always, always, and forever prefer clarity over cleverness. If you can be clever and clear, that's great.

[00:04:12]