"Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in"
About this Quote
Chabon hijacks Pasteur's lab-bench aphorism and drags it into the messy, unglamorous middle of a draft, where "chance" looks less like a lightning bolt of inspiration and more like the accidental solution you stumble onto at 2 a.m. after rewriting the same paragraph ten times. The move is quietly polemical: he’s rejecting the romantic myth of the writer as a vessel for muse-delivered brilliance. In Chabon’s version, luck is real, but it has a prerequisite. You don’t get rescued by serendipity unless you’ve already done the work that makes rescue possible.
The phrase "really engaged" is doing most of the moral labor here. It’s not a productivity slogan about grinding harder; it’s an argument about attention. Engagement implies immersion deep enough that the story’s logic, voice, and constraints begin to generate options. When he says you’ll "work yourself out", the agency matters: the exit from the "jam" comes from within the act itself, not from external hacks, workshops, or waiting for mood to strike.
Contextually, this sits in a late-20th/early-21st-century literary culture obsessed with process talk (MFA lore, craft essays, rituals) and equally obsessed with mystifying talent. Chabon splits the difference with a craftsman’s pragmatism: preparation plus sustained attention makes room for the happy accident. Subtext: if you’re stuck, it’s not a sign you’re a fraud; it’s the job. The jam is where the prepared mind earns its luck.
The phrase "really engaged" is doing most of the moral labor here. It’s not a productivity slogan about grinding harder; it’s an argument about attention. Engagement implies immersion deep enough that the story’s logic, voice, and constraints begin to generate options. When he says you’ll "work yourself out", the agency matters: the exit from the "jam" comes from within the act itself, not from external hacks, workshops, or waiting for mood to strike.
Contextually, this sits in a late-20th/early-21st-century literary culture obsessed with process talk (MFA lore, craft essays, rituals) and equally obsessed with mystifying talent. Chabon splits the difference with a craftsman’s pragmatism: preparation plus sustained attention makes room for the happy accident. Subtext: if you’re stuck, it’s not a sign you’re a fraud; it’s the job. The jam is where the prepared mind earns its luck.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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