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Want to know why I, Ernest Hemingway, am still talked about as a writer when so
many of my contemporaries are forgotten?
I started out my adult life on the battlefield.
Life is a battle. Victory is not to the swift, to the
valiant, or the brave.
(Though that is often the way to bet.)
It is to the one who fights smart.
Long ago Siv Maria wrote to Roland what many of you feel:
"I think I was born too late or too early. In the world
we live in today there just is nothing new anymore."
I felt the same way when I was struggling to find the title
to my new novel. I returned to the giants of the past.
Out of the verses of John Donne, I picked ...
We can prevail if we do not give up. If we assail a knot
until we loosen it, we will succeed.
The Turkish author, Selim Yeniceri, wrote me:
"A great work of art comes through talent which you
bring from birth,
but to make it successful in worldly terms, you have to be a
strategist, because business world is really like a battleground."
Just an hour ago, I was talking with the ghost of Gore Vidal.
We were talking about how politicians love to dissemble with words.
"We will be forgiving only to those who renounce
terrorism.
When a surgeon in an operating room cuts and cleans and amputates,
and the wound bleeds, do we say to him,
'Your hands are stained with blood?' "
This after the massacre in Houla, where more than
100 people--many of them children--were killed.
I mentioned Roland's past posts about the internet craze of
writing an entire novel in a month this last November.
He rolled those Luciferian eyes of his and sighed,
"Ernest, it comes down to whether one wants to be a
carpenter or a woodpecker."
He scowled, "With novels, as with erecting buildings,
it all comes down to design. And proper design takes time as does everything
done with quality in mind."
I nodded, "Of course. Kidnap a woman's child and demand
she write a novel within a month. She will write that novel."
Vidal chuckled, "Any Philistine could, but would it be
a good novel? It is a truism of human nature that what one practices, one becomes.
If they practice slovenly writing, it is a certainty that
they will become slovenly writers."
He smiled evilly. "Now, has Roland's penchant for
getting into trouble gotten any less? And if not, do present me with the gory
details."
And so I did. But Roland is a friend, so you will have to
imagine the lurid tales I told Vidal.
*Remember to buy Heather McCorkle's latest: Honoring A Witch's Heart -
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