Writing & Being Great

I'm currently reading Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. In it, he claims that a bad writer will never be a competent writer, and a good writer will never be a great writer, but a competent writer can become a good writer. In one of his descriptions of a bad writer, he says they "hold forth at open mike poetry slams, wearing black turtlenecks and wrinkled khaki pants." I begin to worry I am the bad writer. Admittedly, I love my black turtlenecks and wrinkled dress pants. I would love to place fourth in a poetry slam, considering I've never been to one. I would like to think that I am at least a competent writer, in his four-tier scale, but am I? Stephen King is one of the greatest novelists of our time and maybe he is right. Maybe I will never be a great writer. Maybe not a good writer, maybe not even a competent one, but why does that matter so much to me?

When questioning whether we are good enough, I think the question is less about the good part and more about what we consider enough. For me, anything less than great is not enough. That is a source of motivation, temporarily, until I realize that it isn't an achievable goal (great meaning the levels of Shakespeare, Keats, Faulkner, etc). I want to explore why I have this innate and deeply rooted drive to be something, while others simply don't. Most days I try to convince myself that I don't need the Ivy League. That I don't need to change the world if I would be happy waitressing and writing bad poetry, but a part of me knows I would never be satisfied with that.

I hesitate as I explain this because some may think that a drive to create lasting change is purely a positive experience. What they don't recognize is that wanting to change the world also comes with the weight of the world. The constant yearning to save everyone and inability to turn off that pressure. Especially with social media, the horrors of the world become much more prevalent and more difficult to ignore, suffocating all but brief flashes of happiness caught up in the moments you are able to forget everything going on outside of you.

And so, when Stephen King first told me I would never be a great writer I was broken. The eternal perfectionist in me immediately started to argue. But as I've expressed there are burdens to the changemaker's mind, and I'm beginning to wonder if he has stumbled on to a larger idea. That as a society we should shift away from idolizing greatness, as that too comes with burdens, most prominently addiction. Instead of encouraging the Ivy Leagues as the pinnacle of achievement, encourage what is right for each individual student. Instead of asking how one wants to be remembered, ask them how they want to live. Instead of highlighting historical figures that made major contributions to our present society during Black History Month, have students highlight people they can see themselves in, those who chose to live joyously instead of publicly. I'm not suggesting those who created change were not important, of course they are, and some students will naturally gravitate toward that and eventually grow up to be that. There will always be students who cannot change who they are at their core, and their core is Ivy-League-change-the-world-perfectionists, but as a society, we would do well to shift the obsession with success to one of self-care in an eternal march toward contentedness. The moment we stop romanticizing success is when we can step back and ask what we want to reap out of life and what we need to get there. Sometimes that means you need time, so you chose not to work, or you work a 9-to-5, and that's okay. I once met a traveling poet who lived in a van driving the country and writing strangers poems on his typewriter to pay the rent back in LA, and he loved that life, meeting random people and writing what they needed to hear. It reminded me that there are no rules in life, as much as society tells you there are, your only job is to survive until you discover how you thrive.