I read about Flannery O’Conner, who, I didn’t realize, died of Lupus when she was only 39. And in that fleeting time made herself famous, that’s how hard working and talented she was. Speaking of confidence, when asked what motivated her writing, she said, “I’m good at it.” The person who asked the question was so baffled by her confidence that he thought at first she had misunderstood him.

I recall, as I have before, the boy in my playwriting class, who read his play out loud and had to stop because he was laughing so hard, overcome with delight at his own romping imagination. I sat there in my dry, tortured silence, wondering what it would be like to be so pleased by your own words, so taken with your own stories. I asked my teacher, way back then, “how do you get the words to flow like that,” and he said, basically, “I have no idea. If I could tell you, I would be a rich man travelling the world instead of a poor teacher sitting here talking to you.”

What I would say to myself now, sitting here, after all these years, is that it’s much harder if you’re not burbling over with delight at yourself, but you can still sit down every day, for some hours, and find your way to something. That would be Melville, probably, Van Gogh, and Cezanne. Artists who kept after it, doggedly, not always joyfully, finding their skill with bullheadedness.