Ernest Hemingway had a lot of good advice for fiction writers. To begin writing he said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” And he demonstrated this with the first sentence of his novel A Farewell to Arms: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.”

Hemingway wrote subsequent sentences with the same clarity. And that is where literature happens; at the level of the sentence. Literature is not complicated. It’s hard work, but it’s not complicated work.