A minute of truth

Tuesday 10/7/25

You know how sometimes you're listening to something--like a podcast or a radio show--and the people doing the talking with each other are leading with so much bluster and attitude? They've adopted personas, gone with a shtick. Day in, day out, as you know if you listen regularly.

Then maybe something comes up, like this rare time, where all of that comes down and goes away. The walls, the forcing, the attitudinal froth, the posturing, the tough person stances, and shit gets real and naked. It's true.

And I don't mean, necessarily, that truth is held up, presented, and offered to you. But rather that people are being real. There isn't the costuming and the hiding, or the implication that you're "soft" or whatever if you aren't hard in the ways that that person pretends to be hard.

You'd be surprised how much truly great writing is like those instances of realness. And this is something I never see now. It's all I do, but it's otherwise not out there.

And if that's not what writing is, if it's not infused with what I'm speaking of in this analogy, such that it's no longer just a moment but the thing itself, then it can't be great.

It takes one minute to read what I just wrote. And there's more value in that minute than in a hundred MFA programs over however many years, where no one is going to tell anyone anything like this.

Which would mean such a person has no value to offer on this score, because that would also mean they just don't get it at all.