There’s this Hemingway quote that shows up on every basic bitch’s Instagram story next to a picture of a typewriter they’ve never touched and a whiskey glass they bought off of Amazon.
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
Everyone quotes it. Nobody fucking does it.
And I get why. Because right now, writing one true sentence feels like juggling live grenades while the thought police take notes.
The world has made it crystal clear what happens when you say the honest thing.
The thing that doesn’t fit inside this week’s approved vocabulary list. (Feels like something straight out of 1984 tbh)
And you see it all the time now. You get reported by professional victims. Flagged by the bots designed by cowards.
Deplatformed by tech overlords who couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag.
Dogpiled by strangers who didn’t read past your first sentence but have PhD level opinions about what you “really meant.”
Your name ends up on some blacklist you didn’t apply for. Some soulless AI in a server farm decides your words are “problematic,” and suddenly you’re shouting into the perpetual nothingness that used to be your audience.
And what usually happens? You fucking soften. You hedge like a nervous politician.
You add more disclaimers than a pharmaceutical commercial. You run every sentence through an internal focus group of “what if Karen from accounting gets offended” and what emerges is this pathetic, beige, room temperature slop that says nothing, offends nobody, and dies quietly between a sponsored post for protein powder and someone’s avocado toast.
[deep breath]
And you call that writing.
It’s not writing. I’d call it intellectual masturbation for people too scared to climax.
Hemingway knew something every frightened creative needs tattooed on their forehead right now.
Writing was never supposed to be safe.
The moment you sit down to say something genuinely true.
I mean structurally, uncomfortably, dangerously true about this fucked up world we’re living in, you’re committing an act of rebellion.
I mean look at all of this Epstein files bullshit and the unlimited amounts of conspiracy theories that are bleeding out onto the internet now.
He said write hard and clear about what hurts.
Not write soft and vague about what’s comfortable. Not write whatever today’s mob will tolerate. Not write what the algorithm jerks off to.
Hard. Clear. What actually fucking hurts.
He also said every writer needs a built in, shockproof shit detector. Yours should be going off right now like a smoke alarm in a meth lab.
You start to feel it every time you scroll through the sanitised wasteland of social media.
Every time you read something and think “that’s not even half the truth, but nobody’s got the balls to say so.”
Every time you write something real, feel its weight, then delete it because you’re terrified of the consequences.
That detector is screaming. You’re just pretending you can’t hear it because facing the truth feels scarier than living the lie.
Here’s what Papa Hemingway understood in his bones, what he proved every time he put words on paper…
The cost of not writing the true thing will destroy you faster than writing it ever could.
Not your follower count. Not your brand partnerships. Not your precious reputation.
You. The part of you that actually matters. The machinery inside that makes your words worth reading instead of just worth scrolling past.
Every time you pull a punch, you teach your soul to flinch. Every time you swap the real word for the safe word, the real word gets harder to find.
I sure as shit don’t want to lose the sentence. And I also don’t want to lose the instinct to write sentences worth losing followers over.
(Cause we’re not going to make everyone happy. I mean that’s boring anyways)
And once that instinct dies. Once you’ve trained yourself to self censor before you even know what you want to say, you’re not a writer anymore.
You’re a content producer. You’re elevator music in blog form.
Hemingway didn’t write to be liked. He wrote to be true. And the truth was frequently ugly, uncomfortable, and completely unwelcome at polite dinner parties.
He wrote about war without making it romantic. He wrote about love without making it pretty. He wrote about the long, quiet ways people destroy themselves, and he did it in short, brutal sentences because truth doesn’t need decorations or sparkles.
That’s what’s missing right now. Not more content. Not more takes. Not more sanitised wisdom that’s been focus grouped into meaninglessness.
The world is missing writers with the balls to write the true sentence.
The one sitting in your chest like a tumour. The one you keep almost saying. The one you’ve typed and deleted six times because you know, you it’s going to cost you something.
Write that sentence.
Hemingway would’ve hit send and told anyone who didn’t like it to kiss his ass.
So should you.
And even if you don’t write as much. Paint, write the song or have the conversations…
Stephen Walker.