“Two Forces” by Steve Almond

Lisa Mecham, a writer who participated in one of my Quest writing workshops, was kind enough to send me a terrific book: “This Won’t Take But A Minute Honey” by Steve Almond. One half of the book is writing wisdom. The other half short stories.

Here is the first piece Almond wrote on the writing wisdom side:

1. Two Forces

The first is an absolute conviction in the importance of your work, the secret and shivery sense that you have been called to the language in some spiritual capacity, that you (and you alone) have stories the world must hear, that these stories are ready to spill out of you with the hot urgency of scripture and that when they do you will be recognized as a rare talent, a writer of the first order and eventually — why fight it? — the fucking Messiah.

You are not the Messiah.

Nor, in all likelihood, are you fucking.

But this mindset is generative in nature. It tends to produce a lot of work, even if this same work later makes you cringe.

The second is the creeping suspicion that any sustained effort to write is doomed, that you will never transcribe the story so perfectly arranged in your mind, will never convey the brilliance and depth of emotion sloshing around in there, and even if you do the best result you can hope for is that your mother will drive to your apartment with a crock pot full of soup and ask why you’re depressed. Rather than quitting, though, you will persist in this enterprise and thus become an ongoing embarrassment to your friends and family, a person without proper dental care, a person of possibly questionable sanity, inevitably arriving at the point, years from now, in which you are loitering outside a restaurant, just enjoying the smell, getting your bearings as it were, when your former fiance shows up with her new husband The Surgeon and pretends not to notice that you are missing a couple of teeth in the mid-incisor range and instead asks, not unkindly, how the writing’s going. The technical term is writer’s block.

You will never rid yourself of these opposing forces. They are what you get for choosing to shut yourself up in a room alone when the rest of the kids are outside enjoying recess. Welcome, comrade!

This is a much more well-written and entertaining version of what I blogged about here: “Feet on the ground… head in the clouds.” By way of comparison, I never mention mother, sloshing, dental care, mid-incisor range, Messiah or fucking. And yet, Almond and I are pretty much making the same point about the dynamic tension of writing.

We have our aspirations, dreams, fantasies, clouds.

That’s one force.

We also have rejection, competition, writers block, reality.

That’s a second force.

The key? Somehow… some way… we have to keep on keeping on.

Take our talent. Learn the craft. Create kick-ass stories.

You can buy Almond’s book here from the Harvard Book Store.

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