Hemingway's Advice for Storytellers

Hemmingway, via my friend David Habecker:

Jeff,

I ran across this reference to Hemingway today and thought you might appreciate it, with its obvious application to much so-called “Christian literature”:

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in,” says Hemingway. “That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better.” He opens two bottles of beer and continues: “I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true.”

The quote is from an article about Hemingway in TIME as referenced on Andrew Sullivan’s blog “The Daily Dish.”