The Best of Bova: Volume III by Ben Bova

Author:Ben Bova [Bova, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625796035
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2017-07-31T21:00:00+00:00

BROTHERS

Over my desk is a page from a collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories. The page contains a brief sketch, set in a town in Spain in the 1920s. Two old bullfighters are watching the young matador who is supposed to be the star of that afternoon’s corrida de toros. But the young star is drunk, dancing in the street with gypsies, staggeringly drunk, in no condition to face the bulls.

“Who will kill his bulls?” one of the older matadors asks the other.

“We, I suppose. . . . We kill the savage’s bulls, and the drunkard’s bulls, and the riau-riau dancer’s bulls.”

The point is, some people get the job done and some people don’t. A successful writer gets the job done. No matter what is happening around him or her. No matter family or weather or finances, a writer writes. The world can collapse and the writer writes. No excuses. No delays. No waiting for inspiration or the right moment or the proper phase of the Moon. A writer works at it. The rest is all talk.

Humphrey Bogart made somewhat the same point when he said, “A professional is a guy who gets the job done whether he feels like it or not.”

“Brothers” is a story about two professionals, doing two very different jobs that needed to be done on a certain day in November 1971.

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