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I sat down recently with my good pal Earnest Hemingway, Pulitzer Prize winner of the Old Man and the Sea, and author of The Sun Also Rises. Here's what he had to say about writing.
Greg: Do you have a tip or two about writing?
Earnest: There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Greg: Gulp!
Earnest: Gesundheit!
Greg: That wasn't a sneeze.
Earnest: Sorry
Greg: Why is it that your prose are so spare and unadorned?
Earnest: If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
Greg: In other words?
Earnest: Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over....My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
Greg: You'd make a good chapter book writer, you know?
Earnest: You think?
Greg: Any last words of advice?
Earnest: We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes
easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then
blasting it out with charges.
Greg: Dang!
Earnest: I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
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