Go On and Write
Background
In the spring of 1934 F. Scott Fitzgerald published Tender Is the Night, his first novel in nine years, and asked his old friend what he thought of it. Fitzgerald was drinking hard, his wife Zelda was in a sanitarium, and he was not sure he could still write.
Hemingway’s answer from Key West was blunt. Most of it takes the novel apart — above all for borrowing real people, their friends Gerald and Sara Murphy, and then bending them into people they weren’t. (“You see well enough,” he told him. “But you stop listening.”)
In the middle of the criticism come the lines below, some of the best advice one writer ever gave another about the fear of not being good enough. Hemingway calls him Bo, tells him he’s twice the writer he was when he wrote Gatsby, and tells him to go on and write.
The letter
Key West
28 May 1934
Dear Scott,
For Christ sake write and don’t worry about what the boys will say nor whether it will be a masterpiece nor what. I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it — don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist.
I’d like to see you and talk about things with you sober. You were so damned stinking in NY we didn’t get anywhere. You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write.
But Scott, good writers always come back. Always. You are twice as good now as you were at the time you think you were so marvellous. You know I never thought so much of Gatsby at the time. You can write twice as well now as you ever could. All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is. Go on and write.
Anyway I’m damned fond of you and I’d like to have a chance to talk sometimes.
Always your friend,
Ernest
Copyright. This letter is still under copyright, held by the estate of Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, edited by Carlos Baker (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), and is reproduced here for reading and study. What you see above is the condensed version that is most often shared: the heart of the letter, with much of the critique of Tender Is the Night left out. The full letter is in the Selected Letters and in Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note.