A special virtual toast to Michael Ventura, author of the essay “The Talent of the Room”, which I recommended earlier this year in my thoughts on writing. He’s graciously given me permission to post his essay. I’m grateful.
Every time I read this piece, something different resonates with me. Right now, as I bang my forehead bloody against plot, I’m drawn to this sentence: Sometimes it takes weeks or months even to begin writing. This is a hard truth for me. It’s easy for me to feel that if I’m not producing word count, I am not working hard enough, which leads down the cheerful road of I’m lazy, I am undeserving, I will fail utterly, everyone will point at me and laugh, the cat will pee on me, Nicola will leave me, the planet will explode…. And yet I know, as I’ve said before, that it’s not a race, that there is no relationship in writing between quanitity and quality (and I mean no relationship: more is not necessarily better, but neither is less), and that, as Michael Ventura goes on to say, the point will always be how you behaved, what you felt, what you thought, what you dared, what you fled, how you lived life, how life lived you, alone, in that room.
Enjoy.