Hemingway on the First Draft

Ernest Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast — his memoir of Paris in the 1920s — in the last years of his life, after he had won the Nobel Prize and was widely regarded as one of the defining voices in American literature. In it, he describes his early years writing in rented rooms and cafes, broke, young, frequently wrong about things, and trying to figure out how to write a true sentence.

The working method he describes is unromantic. He wrote. He cut. He rewrote. He threw out pages. He started again. He was not waiting for inspiration to arrive in final form. He was working toward something he couldn’t fully see yet by making the flawed version first.

His often-quoted line on the subject:

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

This is attributed to him in various forms across multiple interviews and remembered conversations. The exact phrasing is disputed. The sentiment is not.

What he was describing — and what A Moveable Feast illustrates across a hundred pages of detail — is that the gap between a bad first attempt and a finished, true thing is not closed by talent. It is closed by work. Specifically: by being willing to make the bad version and then spend the much longer and less glamorous time improving it.

The trouble with first drafts is that most people treat them as the verdict rather than the starting point.

You try something and it does not immediately work and you conclude that you are not good at this thing, or that the idea wasn’t worth pursuing, or that some other time would have been better. The draft becomes evidence against continuing rather than evidence of what the next draft needs.

Hemingway worked in Paris with very little money, in a city where several much better-known writers were also working, without any guarantee that what he was producing would find an audience. He sat down and made bad sentences until he had better ones.

That is the whole method. The Grow pillar is built on the same logic. Growth is not revelation — it is iteration. First draft, then the work.

What are you calling a failure that is actually a first draft?

Write the next one.