Hemingway’s first writing job was as a reporter covering the crime beat on the Kansas City Star. He took to heart the paper’s in-house style guide, which demanded short, choppy sentences filled with active verbs. And for the rest of his career he wrote terse prose based on that same highly readable newspaper style. Likewise, Fitzgerald’s first writing job was to crank out advertisement copy. Forever after, his fiction was filled with images of advertising, brand names, and the seductive lyrical sentences that still charm us.
