When I was in high school, our English teacher handed us a xerox that contained words in sentences, but there was nothing to identify it. No title, no author’s name. We didn’t know if it was fact or fiction, we didn’t know when or why it was written. The sentences were short, simple, and strangely repetitive. The words were small plain words, and a few of these unimportant words were repeated from sentence to sentence or within sentences. The story was disarmingly uneventful. The teacher asked us what we thought of the writing, and we were all under-impressed and thought the author had a lot of work to do, tightening the writing and combining sentences, and working a little harder to keep our attention, making it a little easier for us to get through the story.

We’d been fed certain rules of effective writing for over a decade and we had thoroughly absorbed them. I didn’t think about this at the time, but I’m fairly certain that if the author had sent the first few pages of his manuscript to an agent or publisher today, they’d have given up after the first paragraph, and he’d never ever hear from them. And, in point of fact, he didn’t send them to a publisher. They were published after his death, because of who he was. The author was Ernest Hemingway, and this was The Nick Adams Stories. And though I doubt any of us had read enough Hemingway to form any kind of opinion about him at that point, we’d heard of him. We knew that other people liked him. He was well-known and well-respected.

And suddenly we saw everything differently. The simplicity of the story seemed significant, even profound. The simplicity of the language seemed elemental, important. The repetition made beautiful, resonant little circles of words. And everything we’d learned about writing was bullshit.

I think the understanding we gleaned from this lesson applies to all things, at least all things creative, and I consider life the biggest creative endeavor of them all. It gave us a new way to read or listen or look at art, without preconceptions or prejudice, and it gave us a new way to think about the creative process and about how that process is taught. Don’t trust platitudes, be wary of easy advice. So much teaching of writing is designed to homogenize our thoughts and words, to eliminate anything quirky or individual. And to make everybody’s voice the same voice, expressing the same things in the same way. They tell us to edit out anything unusual or eccentric, to “kill your darlings.” But your darlings are what make your writing yours. They tell us not to shift point of view, in our writing, but how else can we express what it’s like to live in this world, our world, where everything is constantly shifting and changing and elusive?

“Write about what you know” doesn’t mean write about the clumps of dirt in your backyard, it means to write about what you know to be true, write with honesty about how it feels to be human, even if you’re describing life a hundred years ago, a hundred years hence, or in a world that never existed. To quote Hemingway again, “The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined. That made everything come true. Everything good he had ever written he’d made up. None of it had ever happened. Other things had happened. Better things, maybe. That was what the family couldn’t understand. They thought it was all experience. Nick in the stories was never himself. He made him up.” But Hemingway is being a little disingenuous. Of course, the family is not wrong, because some part of Hemingway is in Nick Adams, and all of Nick Adams is in Hemingway. As is true with any creation — any poem or sketch or novel or song. The good and the bad, the heroes and villains, every minor character or passing pigeon is a reflection and an expression of the person who made it. That is inescapable.

Speak with the rhythm in your head, even if you think people won’t understand it or be able to keep up with it or slow down to it. They might find it beautiful in the end. When they realize who you are.

And read everything you encounter, everyone you meet, as if you’d love what they do, if you knew who they were.