Hacking Away

“If you’re writing a novel, I would say it’s cutting a pass through the jungle. You’ve got a machete and you don’t know where you’re going, except you’re heading east.” – James Salter

This quote made me chuckle. When I worked summers during high school as low guy on the totem pole in a field survey crew, I was often the one out front on some overgrown parcel of land, hacking the way forward for our team with a machete that I sharpened every morning. Really helpful experience, as Salter suggests, even in writing frothy fiction about trans-Atlantic socialites of the twentieth century, many of whom I'd read about in Suzy's gossip column during dusty roadside tailgate lunches...