Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

“I’m writing,” I’d say. “You’re just sitting there.” “It only looks like I’m sitting here.” “Are you not sitting there?” “In many ways, that is exactly what I am not doing.” This is what a dream looks like. It looks like you, trying to do an impossible thing in your head, while you sit there, doing what appears to be nothing, wondering how to explain that the apparent doing-of-nothing is in fact, you hope, something.

I needed somebody who would stop lying to me about the quality of my work. Truth is the only way anything ever gets any better.

There comes a time for all dreamers like this, when your body so desperately longs to be doing the thing it was born to do that not to do it becomes physically painful. This moment is key to dreaming, when you get to the place where it’s harder not to work on your dream than to work on it. This is good. Your heart and soul and mind on the same page now. This dog will hunt.

available evidence, their marriages mostly not falling apart, their children mostly heeding their commands.

I learned, for example, how every mountain climbing movie follows a similar plot: Cool mountain. Product placement. Avalanche. People die! Sherpas know things. Many twentieth-century novels also followed a similar tripartite pattern: Cool, war. Let’s go? War happens. People die! War is hell; now I’m crazy.

I learned how to perceive the source code of a story. The skeleton key to the whole thing, at least for me, was so simple as to be upsetting: Create a question—in the heart of the hero, and in the mind of the audience—and go about answering this twin-interrogation with each new sentence, via concrete images and the totally possible but highly improbable behavior of humane characters in occasionally inhumane circumstances.

A story is an old-fashioned treasure hunt, and what makes it so very hard for the writer is that when you start to write, you don’t necessarily know the nature of the treasure or even what the map looks like. All you need is a human with an empty place inside them they’re hoping to fill. That’s what a story is. We turn the page because we all have the hole in us, too, and we’re all trying to fill it, and we’re hoping the story will give us some ideas about how to do that. That was it. That was the pearl.

I think I was worried about stealing good ideas from others, borrowing solutions to narrative problems. I wanted to solve the problems of art on my own, which is a foolish thing to want. Scientists build off prior discoveries. Artists should, too.

every tribe has its sacred temple, which the funny writer must plunder. What you have to do is go into each tribe’s holy of holies and see what they’re protecting as inviolable. You need to violate it because that which we declare inviolable becomes a god. You’ve got to slip in past the veil and snatch away the gilded calf and smelt it down into what you hope is comedy gold.

this elusive state, in which their command of the art of their work is matched and magnified by their joy in it, to know they are doing and making a beautiful and useful thing. The world falls away, and with it every human frailty.

I would spend the next year pondering this question of how “not-me” I should pretend to be in order to draw more attention to the “real-me” of the book. Thus began the season of my life in which I would post about my book at least once a day, such that I might be unfollowed by many friends on social media, whom I don’t blame, not a one—I’d have grown tired of me, too. I did grow tired of me. I would have unfollowed myself, had that option been available, which it wasn’t, I checked.

It’s shocking to the meritocratic American mind to see how the lead role in the drama of your success, to some extent, is played by Luck. The storyline of the American dream says that you are the protagonist: You call the shots. You take the raw materials of your DNA and life experience and develop a work ethic, a furious dedication to cultivate and shape your own talent and life arrangement in order to manifest your inmost vocational desires, such that you spend decades summoning the storm of your dream, only to find that at the witching hour, whence comes the time for your success to go national, you find yourself sitting in a hotel room really hoping Rihanna decides to wear your book on her head at the Met Gala.

When you do eventually read reviews of the thing you made, there’s one bit of healthy advice I can give you, a balm for the pain: Go read bad reviews of the books (or albums, or films, whatever) that you love. I promise you, nobody’s saying anything about you that hasn’t also been said about George Lucas.

They wanted to measure my success. Which is frustrating, and perfectly illustrative of the contradictions of the American dream, which is that you will want to quantify it, so that you can assess your progress toward it, and this is impossible, for the target will never stop moving. What they are really asking is, Are you a victorious conquistador, or not?

My dream came true, it did: I can access the light inside me, what little there is, can take it in my palm and study it and make it into something funny and beautiful in words that can live on a page in a book on a table for anybody in the world to find, should they desire it, for a book, like any work of art, helps you find a bit of your own light, and my light is silly, and my light is sad, and on good days, my light is true, and I can shine it now, if I apply myself and stay hydrated.

Nobody tells you that a dream is not something you will accomplish, long from now. It is something you do every day. That is all it can be. That is all it ever was.

This seemed to be the story of my dream, distilled into a single shuddering moment: Something amazing would happen, while I stood there, waiting for something amazing to happen, not noticing that something amazing had already happened.