Did Hemingway Really Say "Write Your Pants Off!"?

You'll often read or hear the advice that writing is basically getting to it, sitting down and doing it, or more elegantly that "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."



Someone on Twitter asked me if I thought Hemingway had said a version of it: "apply seat of pants to chair." Well, that sounds as if it could be Hemingway. It's terse and matter-of-fact enough. But I wondered.









As usual, the Internet isn't much help. And even though it shows up,...