What Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Rilke and Annie Dillard Can Teach Us About Writing for the Web

Certainly, there are subtle differences in writing for the web and writing for the sake of literature. Brevity, for one: reading from a monitor is much more tiring than reading from a book, making it even more vital to edit out unnecessary ideas, words and phrases. Make your key points early in your text, keep your text short, and use memorable, active language.

And never hesitate to learn from the masters, even if they wrote decades or even centuries before the advent of the Internet.

• Hemingway: "If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.” And: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.'
• Fitzgerald: “You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” 
• Rilke: "And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.” 
• Annie Dillard: "One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.” 

You write what you read, in a way; so choose your reading carefully. Reading is our continuing education, both in wisdom and the craft of writing itself. And we close, of course, with Hemingway: Never forget that "we are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” The attempt, though, it is all about the attempt.