Highway to Hell

One Step at a Time

Hello Friends,

If you ask writers about what writing books to read to improve your skills, I wager many will mention Stephen King's On Writing. It's an immensely readable, interesting, and supportive book on the craft. Don't be alarmed—it's not scary. It feels honest and insightful.

It contains one of my current favorite passages. He writes:

I don't want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do, we had a chance to change the world and opted for Home Shopping Network instead)…

He was born in 1947. This book was published in 2000—before…

The passage above finishes with his thoughts about how his generation's opinion of writers, at the time he was becoming a writer, was that writing was an inspired, spontaneous act, not an intentional product that was developed from an intentional labor.

Not a bad point, but certainly not the gem that is in his parenthetical aside: what members of a generation, in their youth, hadn't believed that they could change the world? I would venture to say "every." Perhaps it's simply a condition of an adolescent brain.

If you're an optimistic (curious) person (Ted Lasso has been renewed for another season! Yay!), you might see little opportunities to change the world in positive ways throughout your day.

With a belief in free will (a topic I've discussed here before), one would also believe that every one of the roughly 30,000 decisions (yes that many, Harvard says so) a person makes every day is world altering. To their world, at least. And, in extension, the condition of the people in their universe.

It's a big responsibility—changing a whole world. But we do it without even noticing (or caring?). We don't even think about it. We say yes to extra cheese, no to a fourth chocolate martini, yes to one more doom scroll, no to helping a stranger.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we paid attention and tried.

One step at a time. One act at a time. One response to someone else's action. One less moment of hatred and fear. One more moment of empathy and compassion.

Every day, all the time, we change the world.

Dystopia is not a destination, it's a journey. Why not take the road less travelled?

Happy reading and happy writing,

David