Devotion

Getting down and dirty to reach The End

There’s a quote about writing that frequently catches my eye on the internet:

“A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.” —E.B. White

I lean towards accepting this advice partly because E.B. White wrote Charlotte’s Web, the novel that broke my heart when I was eight and was forgiven for doing so as the years passed — a perspective-altering transaction I often reach for.

But as I started to write this, I remembered something else from Charlotte’s Web:

“Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.”

And I started to question whether E.B. White had said it in the first place. What if it was like one of those Disney Winnie the Pooh quotes wrongly attributed to A.A. Milne? What if it originated in a website of nonsense sewn together by bots and attached to famous names?

(How I long to go back to being gullible . . .)

I thought the responsible thing to do would be to find the original source. Su…