Sitting Here, Bleeding

There’s no telling who said it first. Many insist it was Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize-winning literary giant. Some claim he got the quip from the great sportswriter Red Smith and made it his own. Others say no, it traces to Paul Gallico, best known for writing stories that became the blockbuster movies The Poseidon Adventure and The Pride of the Yankees.

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

Might’ve been Thomas Wolfe. Or Gene Fowler. Or Friedrich Nietzsche. Each is thought to have said it, too, though each phrased it somewhat differently. That’s the way it is with thoughts put into words. They echo through the ages. Few are truly original; most are timeless insight adapted to current circumstance.

Speaking of echoes.

Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense and real life often doesn’t.

Who said it? Well, I did, although an assist is owed to a turn of phrase along the same lines that appeared in one of Mark Twain’s last …