On Writing (Hemingway)

On Writing is a story fragment written by Ernest Hemingway which he omitted from the end of his short story, "Big Two-Hearted River", when it was published in 1925 in In Our Time. It was then published after Hemingway's death in the 1972 collection The Nick Adams Stories.

“On Writing” is a deleted ending to "Big Two-Hearted River," an account of Nick Adams' fishing trip in northern Michigan after World War I. When "On Writing" begins, Nick has caught one trout already and observes the river, considering where more fish might lie. Nick credits his knowledge to his friend Bill Smith. This reminds him of another friend, Bill Bird, and their adventures in Europe. His thoughts continue to his old group of friends, his wife Helen, and marriage both to a woman and to fishing, before moving on to memories of bullfighting. Nick then reflects on writing and how it can take reality as inspiration and motivation, but that the stories themselves must be invented. The real reason for writing, Nick realizes, is for the fun of it. He aspires to greatness—wanting to write like Cézanne painted—and believes he knows how Cézanne would paint the river. Inspired, Nick releases his trout and heads back to camp. He stops to remove ticks from a rabbit along the way, but at the end of the story is walking again, "holding something in his head."

“On Writing” was originally part of “Big Two-Hearted River,” which was then published without it in 1925 as part of Hemingway's short story collection, In Our Time. The cut fragment was titled “On Writing”, and was published after Hemingway’s death in The Nick Adams Stories, collected by Philip Young in 1972.

Hemingway was encouraged to cut the fragment now known as “On Writing” by his friend and fellow writer Gertrude Stein, who thought the story slowed when Nick began thinking. Hemingway later wrote, “I have decided that all that mental conversation in the long fishing story is the shit and have cut it all out. ….I’ve finished it off the way it ought to have been all along. Just the straight fishing.”

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