The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life

by Richard Russo

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!