I guess none of us thought of trying to get blurbs for On Being a Writer. We were Midwesterners, after all. But we got this New-York-literary-guy, Will Blythe, to write an introduction, and I’ve always remembered how it started: “When you are trying to write well, it helps to find out what you and authors such as Ernest Hemingway have in common. He, of course, is a dead writer who wrote The Sun Also Rises. You are not. On the other hand, you are alive and scrawling and there may be some consolation in that.” • A lot of people told me that was snide, condescending, and tried to talk me into editing it out. I just thought it was true.
