Prayers to Broken Stones Read Free

crying. And when I finished the story, I had been touched, had been manipulated as all excellent writing turns and bends us, had truly experienced that
frisson
we seek in everything we read.
    I found my way into the corridor, needing air. The story had really gotten to me. And all down the hall, I saw others from the section, sitting on the floor, crying; holding onto the wall for support, crying; standing in small groups outside, many of them crying. Clearly, this was more than merely competent work. We had been reached by a real writer; a writer with a helluva gift.
    When the section reassembled, I called out the title of the story, and said we would now open for discussion.
    Very few hands were raised to offer comments. But the few who did speak, all praised the story. Then, as if the floodgates had been opened, others began speaking without taking turns, just tumbling over each other to say how deeply they had been affected by this wonderful, wonderful story.
    Then it came my turn to offer a critique. And they looked up at me with some uneasiness. Would this awful man savage even this exemplary piece of work, was he merely acid-tongued and snide, did he
enjoy
hurting these delicate souls?
    I said, “Who among you is Dan Simmons?”
    A quiet man whom I hadn’t even noticed, in the third or fourth row, raised his hand. He seemed to be in his early thirties, physically average, a plain man with nothing bizarre or even out of the ordinary about him. He looked at me squarely.
    I only remember, in specific, some of the things I said to him. Dan remembers most of it accurately. But the
essence
of what I said was this:
    “This is not just a good story, or a competent story, or an original story. It is a magnificent story. What you have created here is a wonder. It is what writers mean when they say ‘this is what good writing is all about.’
    “The writing is extraordinarily adept, a level of craft that comes to writers only after years of trial and error. The story is original, and it is filled with humanity. What you have created here is something that never existed in the world before you dreamed the dream.”
    The section was stunned. Fifteen minutes earlier they had seen a poor guy eviscerated, and now they were seeing some other guy raised as a symbol of everything they hungered to possess. (Had I planned the encounter as a demonstration of the two edges of a sword, I could not have put it together more perfectly. In real life, one does not encounter these neat, symbolic scenes of contrast. In real life it’s messy, and rarely plotted for the epiphany. But here I had stumbled into just such a set-piece.)
    Then I said, “Now, having said that to you, I will change your life forever.
    “Mr. Simmons, you are a writer.
    “You will always be a writer, even if you never set down another word. There may be another writer among this crowd, but I think it unlikely that anyone else here is as totally and correctly and impressively a writer as are you. But now that I’ve told you that, I must tell you this: you will never, not
ever
be allowed to turn away from that.Now that you have the knowledge, you are doomed to spend the rest of your life working at this lonely and holy profession. Your relationships will suffer; your wife and family—if you have them—will inevitably hate you; any woman you come to love will despise that part of you for whom the writing is irreconcilable mistress; movies you will miss because you have a deadline; nights you will go without peace or sleep because the story doesn’t work; financial woes forever, because writers don’t usually make enough to pay the rent, allow the spouse to quit a second job, buy a kid a toy.
    “And the most awful part about this, is that most of you think I dumped on
that
man …” and I pointed to the kindly old gentleman I’d savaged, “… but I’ve crowned with laurels
this
man. But the truth of it, is that I was trying to save
his
life, and I’ve just