I was sitting with a friend recently, joking around as usual. I grabbed a deck of cards from a nearby table. “Let’s see if you have special powers,” I said. I’d only played that game one other time. After about ten tries she got this funny look in her eyes, like she could see through me all along. It was a definite switch into a mode of mysterious beauty and staring.

“Six of hearts,” she smiled.

I think that was last Sunday.

The best gamblers do get lucky, but they also have an amazing set of card-playing skills and keen intuition that they have developed over the years.

You need to be lucky in writing and gambling, but you also need years and years of practice to get to the point where getting lucky matters.

Does that make sense?

Or what about the nothing feeling, the ho-hum, that too tells us something.

Off to ponder all this is sleep and see where my night time travels may take me.

Happy writing and dreaming everyone,
Julie

The concept is the same, though: Making the wrong move at the right time, as a response to a tingly scalp or quaver in the gut— and nothing much else. Otherwise, how does an original piece of art even get conceived, let alone composed?
If not through the grace of a faithful gambler’s gall? A moment ago I had nothing; now suddenly–a paragraph, an opening… Blessed Leverage!

I love the way Raymond Carver romanced his day-to-day reality, calling it “coin of the realm”, because he knew every waking moment to be a precious-yet-expendable poker chip–the veritable stuff of his incendiary fictions, stockpiled like powder keg primer, “ammunition” for the master.

A line from one of Carver’s poems:

Use the things that are around you.

My translation:

Get hip to that scalp tingle, because it’s trying to tell you: How one thing leads to another. How it’s already happened, and you, the artist, are merely following. William Stafford called it the “Golden Thread.” A minute ago I had nothing. Then…

Luck is huge. Maybe the biggest factor of all, in the Success Equation. Synchronicity though, is how I choose to perceive it: The mercury in the molar of your Gift Horse, that tells you–when she cracks a grin, don’t go there, but instead write down those peripheral scraps of table talk that rang out, as you raked in your highline pot. As if you could distill the quicksilver–by transcribing it. By learning to recognize it. And sometimes, yes. It feels as though you can.

–DM

The best thing writers can do is keep writing – and not hope for luck, but welcome and jump on it if it comes. If it doesn’t…. just keep writing.

“What we call luck, what we call chance, is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.”

I just got back from Sundance, where a few pitch sessions sprung up out of nowhere (well, not nowhere, it was Sundance after all) but honestly, I wasn’t expecting to go there to ‘work’, I was going for a ‘looksee’. Thank god my single-sentence pitch has been well-honed for months and months now (yes, I neglected to contribute) because when the opportunity presented itself, I was able to just talk about the script without actually ‘pitching’ it. Call it ‘luck’ if you like, but I think because of that relaxed presentation – I started a bidding war between two sales agents. Of course, letting the other one know that someone else was also interested in the script didn’t hurt anything… but that was proof that a solid year of very hard work made me ready for when “luck” presented the moment. If I had met those same people last year at the festival, it would not have been so “lucky” because I wouldn’t have been prepared for that opportunity.

Crediting/blaming “luck” to our successes/failures, I feel discounts our own essential contribution to the equation.