Sit down and bleed...

“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it -- don't cheat with it.” 
― Ernest Hemingway

On a whim I took a "selfie" picture during a recent fishing trip.

In it, I look more grizzled than I have ever noted when looking in the mirror -- maybe it was sleeping on the ground for a week in the rain, but for the first time I looked old to myself.

Certainly delusional, but to me I even appeared to look like a little like Hemingway's iconic Old Man and Sea picture taken after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

No, I'm not there yet, but I can see it coming.

Since it's Hemingway's birthday coming up soon (July 21), why not obsess on him for awhile?

Hemingway's short stories and novels about his younger self-protagonist, Nick Adams, really helped me get through high school. His ultra bare-bones style made it seem possible to write something without a lot of bullshit:

Nick was happy as he crawled inside his tent .... It had been a hard trip. He was very tired .... He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp.

—Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River"

By today's literary standards that seems absurdly sparse and staccato, but at the time it alluded to a subtext that made it clear something was not right in the heart of the character... you just didn't need to go into a lot of whining about it -- his now famous "Iceberg Theory" of writing. 

I read the Nick Adams stories over and over. 

I learned an important lesson when I went to college and an English professor called Hemingway, "the greastest asshole in the history of the world." The class laughed and I felt like somebody has punched me in the balls. It really made me question my own writing ability, my intelligence, my taste... my... mojo. What I learned is not to listen to what failed writers say about other writers. 

When I read Hemingway, I learned about the world and about writing:

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

and

"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."

and

“The first draft of anything is shit.” 

Write what you WANT to write, not what somebody else thinks is good. If you only get three pageviews on your blog... who fucking cares? At least you're still you. Your writing is what you are -- even more so than what you look like or what you say. What you write is what you believe... and it gives you at least a tiny chance to try and define what you really mean and what you believe and what you feel.