How to Write Good Bad Hemingway Quiz

Answer: Charles Dickens

It would have been impressive for Dickens to have the foresight to ape Hemingway, since the British author died in 1870, 29 years before Hemingway was even born!

Volumes titled "The Best of Bad Hemingway" have been dedicated to preserving these hilarious short stories crafted by individuals and submitted for the competition; at the end of the first volume, the authors also included imitations written by legitimate professionals. EB White wrote "Across the Street and Into the Grill"; "Gatsby" author F Scott Fitzgerald created "We Were in a Back-House in Juan-les-Pins," and Raymond Chandler wrote a story subtitled "The Sun Also Sneezes." All in all, many of the stories written by the amateurs seemed to be funnier than Hemingway's contemporaries, and their stories will be used as examples in this quiz to give you some good starting ground. Would Hemingway be happy that he was being mocked so mercilessly? As he once wrote, "The step UP from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal."

Answer: The sun came up once more.

I've heard that Hemingway didn't believe in adjectives, which isn't true. (Allegedly, though, Ezra Pound told Hemingway to "distrust adjectives.") More likely, though, was that he had a limit on how many descriptions to put in any given sentence, so the combined effect seems to hit you like an anvil. Simply put, his writing style is spare. Sentences are short, declarative, and simple. He used run-on sentences connected with "and" to great effect in many of his great works. Consider the opening to "The Old Man and the Sea": "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." There are few modifiers in that sentence that are unnecessary. Hemingway's style makes the diction stronger and more resonant, and it also portrays the bare-to-the-bones, emptiness in mood that prevails in many of his novels.

Here are a few more examples, from successful imitation Hemingway, to catch your fancy:

"Many things had been her fault, like the playing of the cello. But it was better not to think about that now. Now was the time for the running of the comb through the hair and not to think about the retreating hairline or the Italians or even the one he called Mother. Even though the comb was his only remaining weapon, it was a good, clean comb with strong lines and well-made tines." - "The Short Happy Life of Francis' Comb," by Scott Stavrou

"In the fall of that year the rains fell as usual and washed the leaves of the dust and dripped from the leaves onto the ground. The shuttles drove through the rainy streets and took the people to meetings, then later brought them back, their tires spraying the mist into the air. Many days he stood for a long time and watched the rain and the shuttles and drank his double-tall mochas. With the mochas he was strong." -"The Bug Count Also Rises," by John Browne

Answer: Iceberg theory

In "Death in the Afternoon", one of Hemingway's lesser-known nonfiction works, he describes the principle behind the iceberg theory: that which is omitted from a story strengthens it, counterintuitively. What Hemingway achieves, perhaps most easily seen in his short stories, is the connotation of events that are never described in the story.

In "Hills Like White Elephants," an unnamed American is sitting with Jig at a train station, and they seem to be having a fairly boring conversation. Upon deeper inspection, though, we find out that the "operation" they are discussing is an abortion. Even though it's never stated in the story, we understand the emotional pressures on Jig. To take another example, Hemingway's acclaimed novella "The Old Man and the Sea" is about the fisherman Santiago, who catches a mako shark but loses it on the way back to port. If you look under the iceberg (remember, 90% of an iceberg is supposedly underwater), though, it's easy to see that Santiago shares many features in common with Jesus from the Bible, creating intertextual resonance.

So, if the characters in your Hemingway satire face conflicts, don't actually describe the conflicts. Your readers will figure it out if you follow the other tips.

Answer: Lemonade? All Hemingway characters must be constantly inebriated

Hemingway, for lack of tact, was a drunkard for most of his life, beginning at the age of 17 when he first worked as a journalist. He and his drinking buddies (James Joyce, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, etc.) probably cleaned out most of the bars in Paris with their drinking habits. The drinking has its place in his fiction as well. In "Hills Like White Elephants," the characters drink six alcoholic beverages in the span of an approximately five minute conversation. "The Sun Also Rises" sometimes feels like a competition between Jake and his friends to see who can possibly drink the most before the novel ends (SPOILER: Robert Cohn wins).

It's an art to introduce alcohol into your story and make it look natural. Let's see two examples:

Good Bad Hemingway: "The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was a lie. Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I poured some whiskey onto my granola and faced a new day."
- "The Tollway Bells for Thee," by Peter Appleborne

Bad Bad Hemingway: "I nearly passed out I was drinking so much but I decided to have another drink even though I had one about two pages ago."

Very few (if any) Hemingway short stories have children in it. While deaths do frequently occur in his short stories, they are often accompanied not by despair, but by philosophical musing (for instance, in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," when a writer named Harry thinks about his life after being infected by a puncture wound). Hemingway is known for setting many of his works in either Europe or Africa. In another famed short story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber", the title figure slays a buffalo on a safari hunt but is accidentally killed by his adulterous wife.

Answer: Having a character move out to California during the Dust Bowl

The California move is from John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," during which the Joad family migrates from the unfertile plains of Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. They have a miserable time of it in California, fighting to remain together and survive in a hostile landscape.

The other situations are straight out of Hemingway. At the end of "The Sun Also Rises," Jake Barnes, the protagonist, is discussing his life with the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley, whom all the other males in the book have fallen madly in love with. Brett loves Jake, and Jake loves Brett, but Jake was emasculated during the war, so they don't think it's possible to have a fulfilling relationship. In the famous last line of the novel, Jake wonders how his life could have been with Brett.

Lieutenant Frederic Henry appears in "A Farewell to Arms," Hemingway's classic World War I-set novel. Unfortunately for Henry, he falls in love with the nurse Catherine Barkley during the war, and he eventually flees the lines and moves into Switzerland with Catherine. She gets pregnant, but dies in giving birth to a stillborn baby in the hospital. At the end of the book, in a moving scene, Henry walks out alone into the pouring rain.

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" centers around Robert Jordan, an American who is fighting in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The plot revolves around a bridge which the Republican guerrilla troops success in blowing up, but at great personal cost. The title of the novel comes from John Donne's poem "Meditation XVII" in which he notes that "No man is an island" and says "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." That particular passage is superb for its ability to be satirised. For example, Peter Appleborne wrote a Hemingway imitation about a man who falls in love with a woman working at a tollbooth. At the end of the story, the woman sadly notes, "'I do not ask for whom's the tollway belle. The tollway belle's for thee.'"

Answer: A veteran who served as an ambulance driver during the war

Ernest Hemingway served as an ambulance driver during World War I on the Italian front before being wounded in 1918. Returning home to the States, he married (the first of his four wives), and the couple moved to Paris in 1922. Between the World Wars, Hemingway was an important member of the so-called Lost Generation, a group of American expatriate authors living in Europe who felt disillusioned by modern society. His contemporaries included John dos Passos, TS Eliot, and Gertrude Stein.

After moving back to Key West, Florida, Hemingway got involved as a war correspondent with the Spanish Civil War, which had begun in 1936. He remained in Europe during World War II (he allegedly claimed to have gone ashore during the D-Day invasions, although it's more likely that he was left out of the operation). He travelled to cover the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium, but fell ill and was unable to see much of the battle. Several marriages and a 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature later, Hemingway began to deteriorate mentally and physically, and he committed suicide with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.

Hemingway's war experiences shaped his literature. Many of his characters served: Frederic Henry as an ambulance driver, Robert Jordan as an explosives expert, and so on. Even without stories that directly mention the war, it has a massive presence in his writing: for example, in "Big Two-Hearted River," the protagonist tries to overcome his feelings of helplessness left over from the Great War by going fishing and hunting in Michigan.

Answer: Bullfighting

Hemingway's writing draws heavily upon Spanish culture, and several of his greatest works are set on the Iberian peninsula. One criticism that contemporary readers have lavished upon "Papa," though, is his irrationally heavy fondness for the now-condemned sport of bullfighting.

Seeing the Pamplona Fiesta ("The Sun Also Rises", with its title from "Ecclesiastes", was originally titled "Fiesta") between the World Wars in the 1920s, Hemingway grew fond of the "sport." The author did acknowledge that the display would obviously arouse some controversy, but he admired the courage and passion exhibited by the bullfighters. In "The Sun Also Rises", Jake and his fellow expatriate veterans travel to Pamplona for the Fiesta, meeting up with Brett, who is being sought after by at least three different men. Of course, she falls for a new man, the youthful and handsome bullfighter Pedro Romero, who dazzles crowds with his ability and passion for the sport.

Answer: Nick Adams

When in doubt, call him Nick. If you read Hemingway imitation stories, a shocking number of them make reference to the character who appears in 24 of the author's works. Some of the allusions are obvious: "Nick Adams Stopped at the End of the Aisle," but several characters "just happen" to be named Nick. It's not plagiarism. It's a good idea.

In many ways, Nick Adams, who appears in 24 of Hemingway's stories, resembles the author. Like "Papa," he serves in the war, matures quickly, and loves fishing and hunting. The "Nick Adams stories" (collected into a volume of that name posthumously in 1972) show Nick maturing from a boy confused about death ("Indian Camp") to one with children of his own ("Fathers and Sons"). In perhaps the most frequently-anthologized story about the character, Nick finds himself tied up in Henry's lunchroom by "The Killers". Forced to deliver a message for the hitmen to their target Andreson, he recognizes that the men are involved in organized crime and flees Chicago at the end of the story.

Answer: As I Lay Dieting

Sometimes, parodying Hemingway works best when you take an entire story and alter it slightly. One of my favorite imitation Hemingway stories is titled "Hills Like White Heffalumps," which is a word-for-word parody of "Hills Like White Elephants."

"The hills across the valley of Pooh Corner were long and white. On one side there was no shade and no trees and a stuffed animal could fry in the heat in minutes. A small building stood between the valley and the green Hundred Acre Wood. A bear and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building." -Chris McCarthy

The best parodies make sense, in a weird way. Hemingway wrote "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," so we get "A Clean Well-Sighted Ace" (about tennis), "A Lean Well-Tighted Space" (aerobics) and "A Clean Well-Lighted Race" (about cockroaches, believe it or not). Other authors mix their allusions, such as 2005's combined satire of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code" and Hemingway's "A Movable Feast", "Da Movable Code." Then, of course, there's "The Shun Also Rises," "The Dow Also Rises," and "The Bug Count Also Rises." Hemingway wrote "Across the River and Into the Trees," so other authors travel "Into the Obscenity" or "Into the Express Lane at Von's." Feel free to enjoy "The Snooze of Kilimanjaro" or "The Toes of Kilimanjaro," or, if you're not particularly hungry, "A Farewell to Lunch." The options are endless!

Answer: Mention Harry's Bar & Grill, one of Hemingway's favorite hangouts

The International Imitation Hemingway Contest was born as a joke in Century City, California, in 1977, less than two decades after "Papa" committed suicide. The rules of the contest were simple: write one page in the most scandalously-outrageous prose that makes the judges laugh, and mention Harry's Bar & Grill somewhere in the piece. First place, judged by a group of professional writers, earned round-trip tickets and a free dinner at Harry's, which was one of Hemingway's favorite bars when he lived in Europe. Contest judges have included Hemingway's son Jack, acclaimed science fiction novelist Ray Bradbury, "City Lights" bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, George Plimpton, and other celebrities. Sadly, the contest was discontinued in 2005. Don't worry, though: there are websites with devoted contributors writing a Hemingway-esque novel in conjunction. There's always room in the world for more parody.

The International Imitation Hemingway Competition isn't the only writing contest inspired by the works of the masters. William Faulkner, acclaimed Southern genre author, has a Faux Faulkner Contest. Then, of course, there's the classic Edward Bulwer-Lytton contest, where people compete to write the most melodramatic story possible (Bulwer-Lytton's novel "Paul Clifford" is the source of "It was a dark and stormy night").