This is a terrific article. Nicely written and feels really honest. You’re talking here about the real deal, and you you got it right. It took me years to learn the same lesson. The first hint came from Annie Dillard’s “Living by Fiction.” Someone asked her, “Do you think I should become a writer?” “I don’t know,” she answered. “Do you like sentences?” But the significance of her remark didn’t really come home to me until I heard jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans describe his own process. You will fail, he said, if you have some great idea that you’re trying to accomplish. You just have to tell the truth note by note, and if you keep at it maybe you’ll have something when you get to the end.

These insights into your process reaffirm Dillard and Evans and Hemingway too, who famously said, “Just write one true sentence.”

Thanks for writing this article. I loved it!