Put In the Ferns, Leave Out the War
The Sun Also Rises turned one hundred this fall, and first-time readers still file the same complaint: nothing happens. People eat and drink and fish and watch bulls, and wound each other in conversation. A reader on Reddit called the book a boring travel vlog. He meant it as an insult. It is the cleanest description of the method I know.
Hemingway’s subject was as big as subjects get: a war that broke the people it spared. The novel never describes that war. Jake’s injury, the fact the entire plot balances on, gets a few flat words and no explanation. The love between Jake and Brett is never consummated and never analyzed. Everything enormous stays off the page. What’s on the page is trout.
“I took the trout ashore, washed them in the cold, smoothly heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns and packed them all in the bag, three trout on a layer of ferns, then another layer of ferns, then three more trout, and then covered them with ferns. They looked nice in the ferns, and now the bag was bulky, and I put it in the shade of the tree.”
Not one sentence about how Jake feels. The war, the wound, the woman he cannot have press down on that bag of ferns and trout, and the prose never says so. The detail carries the weight exactly because the book refuses to announce it.
Supper at a mountain inn gets sixteen words of accounting. “We did not lose money on the wine, and the girl was shy but nice about bringing it. The old woman looked in once and counted the empty bottles.” An old woman counting bottles is the whole economy of the Lost Generation — young Americans drinking through a Europe that sells cheap and asks nothing. He never says that. He counts bottles.
That is the mechanism, and you can steal it in two moves. Name the largest thing your story is about. Then leave it out. Put its pressure into small, cool, physical facts, and trust the reader to feel what’s missing. Explanation is the refund readers never ask for.
The ending is the proof. Brett, in a taxi in Madrid:
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes.” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
A hundred years on, that baton still does the work: the world interrupts, and the prettiest lie in American fiction arrives. If you have never read the book, that is your assignment. It teaches the craft we teach: what to leave out.
