Making Do With What We're Given

A direct copy-and-paste from Dogberry's blogpost:

I not only knew precisely what he [Tobias Wolff] meant but I agreed [that the ending of one of my stories was too long], and I knew he would have written the end better, and as a reader I would have enjoyed it more; and I knew that I wouldn't change what I had written, because that was the only way I could write it, and if I changed it, it wouldn't be mine anymore. We can't make them perfectly, only as best we can. Hemingway once said that he had very little natural talent and what people called his style was simply his effort to overcome his lack of talent. Don't take that lightly. What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

— Andre Dubus, "Letter to a Writers' Workshop," from Meditations from a Movable Chair (New York: Vintage Books, 1998, 1999)