Richard Russo on writing, comedy, and life

In The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life, Richard Russo says some interesting things about writing, comedy, and life. In the title essay, on the quirks of fate that propel some toward achieving their goals while others abandon them, he writes:

A writer's truest self hides in the same dark terrain where self-doubt and anxiety dwell--those dread whisperers—and it’s that self they constantly assail. They are, I think, the original hackers, determined to hijack the code, to show us who’s boss, to confuse us into thinking the danger comes from without, not from within. Like Odysseus, we have little choice but to lash ourselves to the mast and listen to their Siren song, knowing all too well that they want us on the rocks. There is a narrow passage. There must be.

In "Getting Good," a long essay on what it takes to get good at writing (practice, guidance, feedback from a writing community, maturity, insight, and some other things I'm forgetting), he considers the difficulty of accepting rejection:

Writing communities provide the necessary understanding that the word ‘no’ isn’t personal; that’s important because personal is precisely what rejection (a nine-letter synonym for ‘no’) feels like. When a computer says no—as mine does several times a day—I don’t take it personally, unless I’m really pissed off. After all, it’s just a machine. It’s telling me I’ve done something wrong, which I’d prefer not to be true but invariably is….I don’t take the machine’s intransigence to mean that I’ll never be any good at operating it or that I’m not good enough in general, either. I just have to find my mistake and fix it, after which, assuming I haven’t put my boot through the screen, we can be friends again.

Helpful insight. My favorite essay, though, is "The Gravestone and the Commode," in which he examines the hazards of writing comedy and the close proximity between laughter and pain. A few choice excerpts:

My writing students used to ask, How do you make things so funny? To which I usually replied, I don’t make anything funny. I’m simply reporting the world as I find it....

The problem for a writer with a genuinely comic imagination is not “making things funny” or even locating enough funny things in the real world to write about. Rather, the problem—and it’s the same for any artist—is getting other people to see things as you do, to honor the truth of your idiosyncratic way of seeing. Art, in the end, may be little more than this: convincing people to set aside their natural reluctance long enough to register your vision....

The greatest obstacle comic writers face is that far more people truly see the gravestone than they do the commode. They look on the world and see death, ignorance, poverty, bigotry and injustice, and they see nothing funny in any of it. Worse, they suspect there must be something wrong with people who do....

The final test of what’s funny or not is whether it’s true. Of course I don’t mean if some incident actually happened, or even if the story has been embellished or exaggerated. What I mean is: Is it true to our experience of life? Is this the way people really are? Is this how the world truly works? Not coincidentally, this is the test of all good writing, not just comic writing....

The best humor has always resided in the chamber next to the one occupied by suffering. There’s a door adjoining these rooms that’s never completely closed. Sometimes it’s open just a crack, because that’s all we can stand. Most of the time it’s flung wide open on a well-oiled hinge, and this is as it should be. Those in favor of shutting it tight are always, always wrong.

So true--but those of us who like to stand in that doorway have to be careful or we'll end up getting our fingers smashed when the door slams shut.