The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life

by Richard Russo

And so, badly shaken and far from home, I set about developing a strategy for surviving at an institution determined to make me understand that while I might be as good as anybody, I was certainly no better. The gist of my plan was this: I would (1) pretend to know things I didn’t rather than risk the humiliation of ignorance and (2) conceal, as far as humanly possible, who I was and where I came from. I’d figure out what I was supposed to like and admire, and would do so even when I didn’t. In other words, I would lie through my teeth about everything. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only liar there. College is, after all, where we go to reinvent ourselves, to sever our ties with the past, to become the person we always wanted to be and were prevented from being by people who knew better. Actually, none of this is quite as bad as it sounds. Many years later, giving a commencement address at the college from which my younger daughter was graduating, I would compare going to college to entering the witness-protection program. You’re supposed to try on a new identity or two. Indeed, it would not only defeat the purpose, it would be downright dangerous to leave the program easily recognizable as the person who’d entered it.

And so, badly shaken and far from home, I set about developing a strategy for surviving at an institution determined to make me understand that while I might be as good as anybody, I was certainly no better. The gist of my plan was this: I would (1) pretend to know things I didn’t rather than risk the humiliation of ignorance and (2) conceal, as far as humanly possible, who I was and where I came from. I’d figure out what I was supposed to like and admire, and would do so even when I didn’t. In other words, I would lie through my teeth about everything. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only liar there. College is, after all, where we go to reinvent ourselves, to sever our ties with the past, to become the person we always wanted to be and were prevented from being by people who knew better. Actually, none of this is quite as bad as it sounds. Many years later, giving a commencement address at the college from which my younger daughter was graduating, I would compare going to college to entering the witness-protection program. You’re supposed to try on a new identity or two. Indeed, it would not only defeat the purpose, it would be downright dangerous to leave the program easily recognizable as the person who’d entered it.

Many truly talented people

give up every day.

conclusion. Our fear had been that it was his other professors, his failures in their classes, that had caused him to leave the university, whereas he’d actually left because of us. He was used to the poor opinion of others. He’d always been expected to fail. To him failure was a warm embrace, as familiar and reassuring as his family and the grungy little town he’d spent his whole life in. What Rodney and I were offering him was an entirely different narrative, one he must have yearned for at some level or else he never would have gone to college to begin with, but up close it was so terrifying that he’d fled. Now he was suffering the kind of embarrassment you feel when you flirt with a pretty girl who, for reasons you can’t fathom, flirts back. Since she’s clearly out of your league, she’s either toying with you or has temporarily gone crazy. Later, when she gets a better look at you and returns to her senses, she’ll send you packing. Better to send yourself packing before you fall in love, before you become so lost you’ll never find your way home. What

you, though, maybe forever, is the possibility that you were wrong about her, which in effect means that maybe you were wrong about yourself. —

A writer’s truest self hides in the same dark terrain where self-doubt and anxiety dwell—those dread whisperers—and it’s that self they constantly assail.

Most of the explanations that occurred to me were comic, as were so many of the details on the stone. BORN IN SYRIA, 1897. DIED MAY 11, 1925. How’s that for parallelism? When you’re born, these lines implied, place is the important thing, so the calendar year’s specific enough. When you die, the exact date is the essential piece of information. It doesn’t much matter where, one place being as good as another.

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It’s his artistic personality.

Or, as critic Katherine Powers puts it, “We Americans worry about humor, confusing it with a lack of seriousness. [But] look here. Along with art and immorality, it is humor that distinguishes human beings from animals. It is, furthermore, a truly civilizing force, nemesis to the big battalions, and a vexation and puzzlement to

the purveyors of mediocrity.”

The final test of what’s funny or not is whether it’s true. Of course I don’t mean if some incident actually happened, or even if the story has been embellished or exaggerated. What I mean is: Is it true to our experience of life? Is this the way people really are? Is this how the world truly works? Not coincidentally, this is the test of all good writing, not just comic writing.

The best humor has always resided in the chamber next to the one occupied by suffering. There’s a door adjoining these rooms that’s never completely closed. Sometimes it’s open just a crack, because that’s all we can stand. Most of the time it’s flung wide open on a well-oiled hinge, and this is as it should be. Those in favor of shutting it tight are always, always wrong.

Almost the whole capital of the novelist is the slow accumulation of unconscious observation. —Mark Twain

Hunger has no business preceding ability, but it always does, with no exceptions.

Most complex human endeavors, he explained, require skill and intelligence, and talent always helps, but in addition to these you’ll also need intuition—the ability to recognize what’s related to what, as well as what at first glance appears related but actually isn’t. Your strategy should be flexible enough to take into account not just the difficulties you’ve anticipated but also those you haven’t, because things will go wrong.

Indeed, a good hint that you’ve entered the realm of Art is that you immediately feel like giving up. You become overwhelmed by the astonishing complexity of the task, the sheer number of moving parts over which you have less-than-perfect control, the perversity of happenstance, the impossibility of predicting outcomes. In Life on the Mississippi Twain describes learning to pilot a steamboat as an art because the river you steam up this week isn’t the same one you’ll navigate after a week of rains on your return trip. It’s still the Mississippi and eventually you’ll end up in New Orleans, not some unexpected city, but each trip is different because the river is. You have to know everything about it, know it without having to think, and be certain of your judgments, which will have to be made quickly on the basis of incomplete information, and at night you’ll have to do all this and more by feel. It would be nice if the river were a science because in the sciences there are controls, and if you’ve been careful your results can be replicated. What worked on Tuesday will work on Thursday, a claim that cannot always be made when what you hold in your hand is a paintbrush or a camera or a pen. What was exactly right for your last painting will be completely wrong for this one. Creative people love to claim they know what works, but in reality all they know is what worked. Fortunes are lost and hearts broken in that shift of tense.

Teaching!

How do you learn not to care about something that matters?

Isn’t that what Hemingway advised? In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes a strong case for what he calls “the ten-thousand-hour rule.” Apparently that’s about how long it takes for most people to get really good at anything difficult and complicated.

In a novel of mine called Straight Man, a professor named William Henry Devereaux Jr. remarks that it is the vain hope of middle-class parents that their children will go off to college and later be returned to them economically viable but otherwise unchanged. Hank understands what many parents never quite seem to grasp—that sending kids off to college is a lot like putting them in the witness-protection program. If the person who comes out is easily recognizable as the one who went in, something has gone terribly, dangerously wrong. Indeed, these young men and women we’re returning to you today have been so thoroughly messed with—and I don’t mean messed up—that you may not recognize them, especially dressed as they are.

what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is trying to ensure that you don’t wake up at thirty-two or thirty-five or forty tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren’t paying strict attention, either because the money was good or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semivalid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you’re lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don’t come with any guarantees.

Search out the kind of work that you would gladly do for free and then get somebody to pay you for it. Don’t expect this to happen overnight. It took me nearly twenty years to get people to pay me a living wage for my writing, which makes me, even at this juncture, one of the fortunate few. Your work should be something that satisfies, excites and rewards you, something that gives your life meaning and direction, that stays fresh and new and challenging, a task you’ll never quite master, that will never be completed. It should be the kind of work that constantly humbles you, that never allows you to become smug—in short, work that sustains you instead of just paying your

bills. While you search for this work, you’ll need a job. For me that job was teaching, and it’s a fine thing to be good at your job, as long as you don’t confuse it with your work, which is hard not to do.

it was hard to ignore the possibility that this prayer had been answered—ironically, of course, as our prayers are answered all too often,

Part of the difficulty of teaching anybody anything is that mastery, once achieved, often induces amnesia and impatience in equal measure. Having arrived at understanding ourselves, we no longer recollect what we were confused by or what was causing that confusion. Driving a stick shift, for example, feels intuitive after you’ve got the hang of it. Your left foot knows where to find the clutch, when to depress it, when to let up and how fast, when to slip the stick out of one gear and into the next, where the various gears are located, where you should be looking when all this happens (at the road, not the diagram helpfully provided on the ball of the stick, not on the floor beneath the dash where the clutch was the last time you looked, before it moved so that you can no longer locate it).

As we mature we see patterns, and those can resolve themselves into worlds.

himself.

folk.”

“A Father’s Story”