Words of wisdom

In the midst of volumes and volumes about the business of writing that’s accumulated in this corner of the blogosphere, this particular snippet leaped out at me:

[He] was never a failure, in the sense that his books are very good books, carefully wrought. His career might stutter along in obscurity, but the books were solid. And I think the only way he could go on doing that, year after year, without either giving up or turning bitter, was that he trained himself to know that the work was very important but at the same time it didn’t matter at all. And the extension from that was that all of life was very important but at the same time it didn’t matter at all.

It’s taken from Donald Westlake’s introduction to Charles Willeford’s THE WAY WE DIE NOW, which has just been reissued by Vintage and is the last in the quartet of Hoke Moseley novels — all of which should be required reading.

Now I grant that Willeford and Westlake began their careers at a time when toiling in obscurity was almost a requirement for a writer to learn his or her craft — and this stretched all the way to the 70s and 80s, when people like Martin Cruz Smith, Ed Gorman and John Harvey were starting out their careers churning out pulp piece after pulp piece — and that this world doesn’t exactly exist anymore. But there is something incredibly liberating, at least to me, in knowing that ultimately, no one cares, everyone is expendable and the publishing game should be A priority, not THE priority.

Never mind that I should only dream of being able to write like Charles Willeford did at the end of his life.