I Tried Hemingway's (amazing) Daily Routine

Why do we all know his name? Why does every bookstore have his books? The way people live their lives is fascinating to me. And every time I step into somebody else's shoes, I learn something new. The great artists and makers of history didn't leave their mark by accident. I love to write, and I'm writing more than I used to, and I want to become a better writer. And so I figured, why not get inside this man's head? Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is. So in the latest episode in my series on living like the Giants I've decided to live the daily routine and take a deeper glimpse into the life of the one and only Ernest Hemingway. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. I guess the place to start is with what his daily routine looked like. Thanks to Daily Rituals by Mason Curry, which by the way has been super useful throughout this entire series, we get an idea of what this looked like. And actually a lot of this comes from a 1958 Paris Review interview. When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work, and warm as you write. You read what you have written. and as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next, and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at 6 in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. What I find really interesting about this routine is that it's built entirely around momentum. It's being very consistent. It's always having a place to easily pick up from and then finishing off the day at a natural stopping point so that it's easy, once again, to pick up from there. I feel like this is very underrated because when you write, oftentimes you'll have bad days and it can get very demotivating and you want to stop. But if you have systems like this in place, it feels like it's a lot easier to create a daily habit out of it. you love I find that line hilarious he sounds like a writer I'm excited to get going I have never ridden with the typewriter before as this series has illustrated everybody has a different daily routine and that can change over the course of your life but I have noticed this pattern of a lot of writers and creative people working intensely in the morning it seems like that's the part of the day when a lot of people have the freshest brainwaves you know and can put the most intensity into their work. You know, if you start early, you're pretty much done by lunchtime. Curry also shared a little bit of some of Hemingway's idiosyncrasies when writing. He wrote Standing Up, facing a chest-high bookshelf with a typewriter on the top, and on top of that, a wooden reading board. He tracked his daily word output on a chart. So as to not kid myself, he said. When the writing wasn't going well, he would often knock off the fiction and answer letters, which gave him a welcome break from the awful responsibility of writing. Or, as he sometimes called it, the responsibility of awful writing. Okay, it is nearly noon. Feeling like I'm arriving at an actual stopping point. This has been incredibly productive. I am so happy with what I've written so far today. What an amazing way to start the day. I've never worked with a typewriter before. It's a lot slower. than working with the computer, but it's also so fun. There's so much direct feedback. I actually made the decision to not use my phone. So I put it away and that also meant that I wrote without music and I almost always write with music and I actually really enjoyed not having easy distractions, text messages or emails coming in or anything else. I'm making an obscene amount of typos and spelling errors also when you mistype on here it's literally ink on the page so this is a lot it feels good to just hold this and look at this and be like wow i did this this morning i'm finding it very enjoyable to retrace hemingway's steps here in order to write about life first you must live it hemingway spent his life in a variety of different places in the us and canada in Cuba in Spain and of course in Paris and actually I'm going to focus on his time in Paris because it feels like it was in this city that his career took shape and that it really took off. This was his first apartment where he lived a century ago. Pretty cool. Okay, I better leave before the people around here think I'm a creep. Okay, good morning. I've decided to work in the kitchen today because the light I mean, look at this. The light is beautiful. To add to our auditions today, I've got a wooden reading board. Hemingway actually started off his writing career as a journalist, and it was while he was working in Chicago that he met the novelist Sherwood Anderson, who convinced Hemingway to visit Paris because it was inexpensive and because it was where the most interesting people in the world lived. It was there that writers like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce and Ezra Pound would help him kickstart his career. And so it was as a foreign correspondent with the Toronto Star that he was able to move to Paris. I had a little bit of a trickier time today. I think I got to go to bed a little bit earlier. It's pretty intense. It's more intense than it seems. Hemingway is said to have seemed fresh in the morning, diving into his work, even despite going to bed late, even despite all of the drinking that he did. I don't really understand it. I do think that it's really important not to forget that Hemingway himself was part of what was known as the Lost Generation, which was a term that Gertrude Stein first coined and then Hemingway himself popularized, which described the post-war generation. all the people that were entering adulthood right around World War I, and then had to navigate this very disorienting, difficult wandering in direction in this period. Times were different, like everybody drank a lot more, smoked a lot more. Hemingway himself was an avid drinker, and I think it's dangerous to romanticize too much a life in this time period, because there were, you know, ideas around mental health were just non-existent. Things have changed. radically since then. And so while today's world has plenty of its own downsides, I'm not trying to brush over that either, I'm glad to live in a world that has so many more tools and so much more of an understanding or developing understanding around mental health. And on that point, I want to speak briefly about this video's sponsor, which is BetterHelp. BetterHelp has definitely made therapy way more accessible than it ever was in the past. Just the fact that you can do this now from the comfort of your own home is incredible to me and it's designed to be flexible and fit into your schedule and on top of that you can change therapists and keep changing therapists until you find somebody that fits and then when you do find somebody that you match with you can choose how you communicate with them whether that's through video phone call or text I've been working with my own therapist for six years now nearly six years now and it is just so endlessly helpful to work with somebody who has an outside perspective on your mental blocks, on your drama, and they can help you navigate past these hangups. BetterHelp has a diverse network of over 30,000 licensed professionals. So if you're interested, you can click the link in the description or go to betterhelp.com slash Nathaniel Drew. And if you use that link to sign up, you can get 10% off your first month. Okay, let's dive back in. So I've taken a pause here. to take stock of how these first four days are going in terms of output. I'm doing roughly a thousand words a day. That says nothing of the quality of the words, obviously. But there's something about writing where you really just got to put a lot of words out for the way he put it. The first draft of anything is shit. Hemingway actually coined a writing technique of his own that was called or that is called the iceberg theory or the theory of omission. And it's very simple. I mean think of an iceberg most of its underwater, right? So what he would do in his writing is intentionally just focus on what's on the surface Just as with an iceberg just because you don't see most of it doesn't mean it isn't there and so through his Concise and simple writing. There's a whole other subtext It's almost like as you read his words you have to read between the lines as well, which gives the work Layers, you know, there's depth to it. I do not feel like I did very much quality writing but I think days like this are inevitable. I admire Hemingway's work ethic and maybe even more than that his commitment to make the work that he did be good work. He was famously a big drinker and I already mentioned that in this video but when I was researching about his life in making this video I discovered the extent to which he was an alcoholic and Hemingway himself didn't shy away from talking about his drinking. He famously said that he drank to make other people more interesting, which, you know, is kind of a sad thought, but relatable. For some reason, great writing often goes hand in hand with alcoholism. Of the six Americans who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature by 1962, five were either heavy drinkers or full-blown alcoholics. William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and Hemingway. And there is no doubt that the alcohol wrecked his body. He couldn't even stop despite doctor's orders. So, you know, I thought about incorporating alcohol into this daily routine. to put myself a little bit more in his shoes but I ultimately decided not to because I barely drink and I'm definitely not a functional alcoholic and so if I tried to drink anywhere near what he would drink on a regular basis no work done there would be nothing I wouldn't accomplish anything and I just feel like that would sort of defeat the purpose of this experiment another day riding in this beautiful light it's glorious I did feel however that it was only appropriate to go get a drink in his honor, in his name, at one of the places that he most loved to go. This is the Ritz, Paris. They say that he came and liberated the Ritz during World War II. The Germans had already left. He was just one of the first to arrive. He ran at the tab, 51 Dakiri's or something like that. I think it was a festive day. But in terms of actually liberating it, not really. Liberating the bar. It's insane. Hemingway's life and his work are for me a reminder of the power of simple and concise language. His work has really impacted me. Ever since I read The Old Man and the Sea I felt I had to do this. Cheers to Hemingway. Here's to a man who was always pushing boundaries through his sense of adventure and duty. and who left us all with his beautiful stories. By the way, if you're interested, I am sharing all the work that I'm doing this week on Substack. I'll leave a link to that in the description. If you enjoy these videos and you enjoy the way that I see the world and see life, I think you'll get a lot out of my Substack. It's basically like a newsletter, like a blog. And I've been using it as a way to share essays of my reflections of what I'm learning as I'm trying to live a meaningful and intentional life. you

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Timestamps:

0:00 – Intro
1:01 – Hemingway's Daily Routine
3:39 – First day reflections
4:34 – Hemingway's relationship with Paris
6:02 – The Lost Generation
7:16 – Sponsor
8:22 – Word Output
8:53 – The Iceberg Theory
9:53 – Hemingway's relationship with alcohol
11:15 – A drink in his honor
12:29 – My Newsletter