Charles Bukowski gives the best writing advice ever

So you want to be a writer?

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything, 
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth 
and your gut,
don't do it. 
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.

if you're doing it for money or 

fame, 

don't do it.

if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of 

you, 

then wait patiently. 

if it never does roar out of you, 

do something else. 

if you first have to read it to your wife 

or your girlfriend or your boyfriend 

or your parents or to anybody at all, 

you're not ready. 

don't be like so many writers, 

don't be like so many thousands of 

people who call themselves writers, 

don't be dull and boring and 

pretentious, don't be consumed with self- 

love. 

the libraries of the world have 

yawned themselves to 

sleep 

over your kind. 

don't add to that. 

don't do it. 

unless it comes out of 

your soul like a rocket, 

unless being still would 

drive you to madness or 

suicide or murder, 

don't do it. 

unless the sun inside you is 

burning your gut, 

don't do it. 

when it is truly time, 

and if you have been chosen, 

it will do it by 

itself and it will keep on doing it 

until you die or it dies in you. 

there is no other way. 

and there never was.

                         

More Bukowski on Truth and Beauty:

Charles Bukowski: words to live by

Charles Bukowski: "Born into This"

Charles Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart"

Charles Bukowski's apocalyptic vision: "Dinosauria, We"

Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter   

Walter White's family sculpture

I'm not much for TV, but "Breaking Bad" is that rare show which grabbed me from the get-go and never loosened its grip. 

For the first time in my life, watching a single episode in a sitting wasn't enough. It was an addiction: when one episode ended, I felt a strong urge—sometimes an overwhelming urge—to watch the next one, and usually did. I cut myself off at three episodes per viewing, but only because of the late hour (I watched "Breaking Bad" exclusively at night). Left to my own devices, I could have binge-watched it straight through.

It followed that when I was tasked with creating a fictional family sculpture for a family therapy class, I chose the domain of Walter White. Below are two family sculptures with explanations of how the positioning, body language, and expressions of the characters in the images reflect their roles/status on "Breaking Bad." The narrative is written from the point of view of a hypothetical therapist (not in the actual show) who interacts with Walter following his arrest in the final episode.

***

Preface

Allow me to explain the circumstances under which Walter White (“Walt”) came to create

Walter White, before he became
a meth manufacturer

the Photoshopped family sculpture that appears just under this preface. 

It all started when Walt, a high school science teacher, found out he had terminal lung cancer, roughly two years before I met him. Worried about his family’s long-term financial health and desperate to make as much money as he could before he passed on, Walt went on a meth lab bust with Hank—a DEA agent who happened to be his brother-in-law—to learn what he could about this potentially lucrative drug. At the bust, Walt saw Jesse, a former student of his, escaping out the second-story window of the meth house. 

Walt later contacted Jesse and they started cooking and selling meth so that Walt could, in his words, “support my family.” This decision created a number of negative, unintended consequences, including many deaths. 

Saul, a lawyer, was brought in to help Walt and Jesse with business logistics and fallout. Mike, a professional fixer, kept Walt and Jesse out of trouble. Walt’s wife, Skyler, refused to sleep with him after she found out what he was doing, but chose not to tell their son (Walt Jr.) what was going on, for fear of how disappointed he would be that his father (and personal hero) was in the meth business.

At the time Walt was arrested by the authorities—two years after his meth journey began—Jesse was going into hiding, Mike and Hank were dead, and Walt had completely alienated two of his four surviving family members (Walt Jr. and Hank's widow Marie, Skyler's sister), who now knew what he had been up to. His baby daughter Holly was too young to have a fully formed opinion about her father. 

Walt was incarcerated after his surprising recovery from multiple gunshot wounds. While Walt was awaiting trial, his cancer hit stage 4. As the prison therapist, I was tasked with trying to arrange a final family reconciliation. To get a sense of what I was dealing with, I had Walt do a sculpture, then interviewed Skyler, Marie, Walt Jr., and Saul, after which I created a second (in my opinion, more objective) family sculpture.

Walter White’s family sculpture

At first, Walt was resistant to doing this exercise. He wasn’t remotely interested in consciousness-raising ("What’s the point?” he said. "I'm dying."). But Walt dug in once I convinced him it was necessary, Photoshopping together the artistic sculpture above, which captures the state of his extended family a few months before the arrest, when Mike and Hank were still alive.

The first thing I noticed is that Walt placed himself front and center. From what family members told me, Walt was a kind, gentle man (one of the interviewees called him a "milquetoast") until his time in the meth business toughened him up and made him feel like a kingpin, thus in this sculpture Walt has the dead-eyed, hard stare of the ruthless businessman, rather than the soft smile of the loving father.

Walt put Jesse just off of his right shoulder, while his real son, Walt Jr., is way off in the background with a long face, confused about what is happening around him. In fact, Walt’s whole family is disengaged in the sculpture. Skyler, by keeping quiet about Walt's business ventures, was an enabler; thinking it the least-worst option under the circumstances, she reluctantly accepted what Walt was doing and even helped him launder drug money. For that reason, she is closest to Walt, trying to look the camera head-on, as she sees herself as a problem-solver and a realist, yet she is not close to him in the way married couples often are. Hank, a highly determined man who spent two years trying to find the big new meth dealer in Albuquerque, looks on suspiciously. Just behind Hank is his wife, Marie, a generally weak person who was caught up in a maelstrom of events she didn’t understand, and thus is the furthest back.

It’s telling that Walt included his business associates in the sculpture and gave them the same spatial significance as his family members; during the time depicted in his family sculpture, Walt was married to the business. His partner in crime, Jesse, is at an angle; Jesse has some moral qualms about the meth trade, but it’s all he knows and if he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it right—thus his game face. Mike, on the far left of the frame, is the most relaxed person in the drawing (“I got this,” he seems to say), having the only smile in the bunch, his hands crossed in front of him. He stands straight, facing the camera directly (“I am who I am”). Saul is way in the background, between Mike and Jesse. His slight backward lean and pull of the tie reflect a lawyerly cockiness, but true to his risk-averse nature, he is way in the background, where he likes to be.

Walt’s newborn, Holly, does not appear in Walt’s family sculpture. This is ironic because Holly’s imminent birth was the primary motivation for Walt's decision to go into meth manufacturing. In just two years, Walt had become so comfortable with his role, and the top dog status it afforded, that the role was playing him: no amount of money could convince him to stop his dangerous business, and he had forgotten why he'd become involved with meth in the first place (to support his family).

My sculpture of the extended White Family

Once Walt had done his family sculpture, and I'd questioned him about it at length, I contacted his wife Skyler, who favored a reconciliation before Walt’s cancer took his life. She was more than willing to talk and filled me in on everything that had happened in the two years since Walt had received his cancer diagnosis (everything she was aware of, anyway).

It took effort, but after some prodding I was able to convince Walt Jr. and Marie to come in for separate interviews. Despite my attempts to coax them to focus on the present, neither agreed to an eleventh-hour reconciliation with Walt, as they felt more betrayed by his actions and cover up than Skyler, the only family member to whom he had confided long before his arrest. Walt Jr. spoke for both of them when he said, “My dad wasn’t the man I thought he was.”

Seeking an outsider’s perspective, I called Saul, who had just returned to his law practice after being in hiding. Saul ignored my messages for a few weeks, so I went to his office. Once I had signed an airtight non-disclosure form, he filled me in on things—business issues in particular—that Walt’s family didn’t know about.

Based on all of these interviews, I created a second family sculpture (above) which I feel more accurately portrays the broader dynamic of the extended White family as it existed a few weeks before Walt's arrest.

As with Walt’s family sculpture, I included his close business associates, and gave them as much visual space and relevance as his family members. Again, I put Walt in the center, as he was my client, but I didn't give him the prominence that he accorded himself in the first sculpture; his image is no bigger than many of the others. Marie and Skyler told me that Walt, even at the end, was not the macho bad-ass he thought he was, but was still an essentially insecure man who was overcompensating for feelings of personal failure that stemmed from his having sold off his brilliant scientific patents for peanuts before they made his former business partners millionaires, leaving him to become (in his mind) a “lowly” high school science teacher.

Walt’s sculpture correctly reflected the bifurcation of work and family, so I put his family on the left and business associates on the right. Again, Jesse is just off of Walt’s shoulder. Despite frequent tensions rooted in deep personality conflicts, Saul told me that Walt and Jesse were a unit and that Walt seemed closer to Jesse than he was to his own son; Jesse was a surrogate son of sorts who was estranged from his parents.

Jesse maintains his game face, as Saul told me that Jesse was “a serious kid who didn’t laugh much.” Saul again stands sideways, not revealing all of his motives, hands in a cat’s cradle as if he is scheming, something he is very good at. Lydia, a meth distributor who was always in a hurry, has a hand on her hip, as if she’s ready to go any second, and is furthest away from Walt, since he had no personal connection to her. Todd, who Walt cooked with just before his arrest, is furthest back and smaller than the others, hands in his pockets, to indicate his lack of confidence due to being a high school dropout from a family of convicts who provided little love or direction when he was growing up. Walt did not include Lydia or Todd in his sculpture, as he held them in low regard, status-wise, but it’s clear to me from what I’ve learned that they played prominent roles in his business.

Family members appear to Walt’s left. I’ve left out Walt's daughter Holly because the world Walt had created by this point was a grim, adult place far beyond an infant’s comprehension. I’ve made Skyler and Hank larger than Walt Jr. and Marie because they had stronger personalities and more active connections to Walt’s drug business, with Hank hot on Walt’s tail as he tried to find out who was manufacturing the blue meth that was selling like hotcakes in Albuquerque.

You may have noticed that no one is smiling in my family sculpture. Though he was in denial about it up to the day of his death, Walt’s recklessness sent deadly ripples through these peoples’ lives. Unlike Walt’s sculpture, my sculpture does not hold everyone together like a team photo, but presents a series of fractured stills showing the way the White family—including Walt’s business family—was broken apart by his decision to pursue methamphetamine manufacturing.            

The Wheel of Emotions

Opinions differ about the depiction of emotion in fiction. Some writers feel that the most important action takes place in characters' hearts, and see the protagonist's emotional growth as an essential component of the narrative arc, perhaps even the main story line. Other writers, whether out of skepticism about the human capacity for change or a preference for plot movement on the physical plane, focus more on occurrences in the external world than internal reactions to those occurrences. I fall somewhere in between, filling in more emotion for characters who are in touch with their feelings and less for characters who keep things close to the vest (or are just plain shallow); some characters—like some people—are simply less knowable.

Wherever one falls in this discussion, the Wheel of Emotions, or The Emotion Wheel (courtesy of the The Writer's Circle group on Facebook) can be a helpful tool. The wheel provides a comprehensive taxonomy of emotion, from deep core feelings (fear, anger, happiness) to more particular manifestations (anxious, frustrated, joyful) to distinct forms of those manifestations (overwhelmed, irritated, ecstatic), all of which is handy both for writers trying to effectively convey their characters' inner worlds and for anyone who wants to know what makes human beings tick.

                                          
                                     More pieces about writing on Truth and Beauty: 

             "Magic A is Magic A" and other elements in the Periodic Table of Storytelling

                                        

                                  Charles Bukowski: So You Want to Be a Writer?

                                                First and Last Sentences

                                                The Emotion Thesaurus

                                                          Freewrites
                                             
                                                    * Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter  

The Emotion Thesaurus

I'm in the show, don't tell school of fiction writing. 

For better or worse, depending on the sensibility of the reader, I include a fair amount of description in my fiction. This is both conscious (a desire to mold round, sympathetic characters in vivid physical landscapes) and unconscious (a reflection of my sometimes fine-grained sense of detail, a carryover from the observational journal writing I did in my teens and twenties).

In the process of editing my novel, I inevitably find characters repeatedly doing some of the same things—walking, sitting, standing, smiling, listening, looking—and experiencing a common subset of emotions (happiness, sadness, excitement, worry).   

To challenge myself as a writer and keep the experience fresh for the reader, I strive to change the words and phrases describing these actions and states as much as possible. And I generally prefer to communicate emotions through non-verbal cues and body language rather than directly tell (telegraph) what a character is feeling inside, though I make exceptions for more stoic or introverted characters.

Roget's Super Thesaurus and thesaurus.com have helped me dig out individual words for simple actions, but single words are rarely enough to convey characters' emotions. The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression, which includes 75 emotional states—such as amazement, curiosity, love, desire, depression, and nostalgia—goes much further. 

Each state has a two-page entry which begins with a definition and follows with five sub-categories: physical signals, internal sensations, mental responses, and cues of both acute/long-term and suppressed emotion.

The first entry, adoration, is defined as "the act of worship; to view as divine." 

Thirty-two physical signals are listed next, including "becoming unaware of one's environment or other people" and "keeping trinkets, pictures, or articles of the subject."

Internal sensations and mental responses follow. Gratitude's internal sensations include "a release of all bodily tension" and a "heart that feels full"; among gratitude's mental responses is "desiring to repay another's kindness and support."

After sensations come cues. One cue of acute or long-term adoration is "a sense of destiny (of belonging together)." Cues of suppressed adoration include "watching or observing from afar" and "creating chance run-ins." Branching off of the cues of acute emotion is a section

entitled "MAY ESCALATE TO," e.g. adoration "MAY ESCALATE TO LOVE, DESIRE, FRUSTRATION, HURT."

Each entry ends with a writer's tip. The tip for regret mirrors the main purpose of this book:  "Watch for possible description crutches. Is the color 'green' used too much? Does a sensory sound (like wind rustling through the trees) happen in multiple scenes? Keep track of these details to avoid overuse." 

If you know a creative writer who wants to expand their horizons—and their craft—consider gifting The Emotion Thesaurus this holiday season.

                                     More pieces about writing on Truth and Beauty: 

"Magic A is Magic A" and other elements in the Periodic Table of Storytelling

Charles Bukowski: So You Want to Be a Writer?

Fifteen Minutes in San Francisco

First and Last Sentences

Freewrites

  

Charles Bukowski's apocalyptic vision: "Dinosauria, We"

Charles Bukowski was an antibody to American Optimism.

Through 50 years of poetry and prose, Bukowski focused most of his attention on quotidian matters—drinking, sex, work life—from the vantage point of someone on the margins of society. Though there were exceptions, such as “The Laughing Heart,” a poem that touches on self-empowerment, Bukowski generally portrayed life in blunt terms as sad, painful, and unforgiving. Resistance was futile; inscribed on his headstone were the words “DON’T TRY.”

The frequent razor strop beatings Bukowski suffered at his father’s hand as a teenager may in part explain this grim fatalism, but much of it was rooted in the personal observations he made over several decades spent in downscale areas of Los Angeles. Not only were human beings often needlessly cruel to one another, but the unprivileged masses were beaten down by a dehumanizing economic system which controlled postmodern life. We were all prisoners to the system, to bills and debt and full-time employment, an unnatural condition which made true freedom and human fulfillment elusive.

This larger framework of hypercapitalism’s spiritual poverty was often communicated through the microcosm of Bukowski’s firsthand experiences. Though he wasn’t known as a political writer, in the poem “Dinosauria, We” Bukowski brought the personal and political together.

The first thing one notices about the poem is its lack of order. Like life in Bukowski’s view, this poem is messy. The free verse spills out—there is no first stanza, second stanza, etc.—with no punctuation until the two periods at the end. It’s a shapeless poem which reads like a dirge.

From the opening lines (“Born like this/Into this/As the chalk faces smile/As Mrs. Death laughs/As the elevators break/As political landscapes dissolve/As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree/As the oily fish spit out their oily prey”) the reader is dropped into a

rapidly decaying world, the “Into this.” Bukowski also seems to suggest (with the words “Born like this”) that human beings are inherently corrupt, complicit in the horrors around them.

The next section continues the “Born like this/into this” refrain, but ramps up the despair by showing how humans project their pain onto others, which only reinforces the sadness of life (“Into these carefully mad wars/Into bars where people no longer speak to each other/Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings”).

About a third of the way into the poem, Bukowski explores some of the ways in which the deck is stacked against us (“Born into this/Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die/Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty/Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed/Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes”).

The final “Born into this” refrain shifts the emphasis of the poem from the larger, impersonal forces that poison our world to the effects of these forces on the individual (“Dying because of this/Muted because of this/Castrated/Debauched/Disinherited/Because of this/Fooled by this/Used by this/Pissed on by this/Made crazy and sick by this/Made violent/Made inhuman/By this”).

Struggling to cope with the madness of the universe, humans lapse into self-destruction (“The heart is blackened/The fingers reach for the throat/The gun/The knife/The bomb/The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god/The fingers reach for the bottle/The pill/The powder”).

While “the rich and the chosen…watch from space platforms,” the forces of self-destruction that afflict common people manifest in the outer world, which careens toward apocalypse (“We are born into this sorrowful deadliness/We are born into a government 60 years in debt/That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt/And the banks will burn/Money will be useless/There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets/It will be guns and roving mobs/Land will be useless/Food will become a diminishing return/Nuclear power will be taken over by the many/Explosions will continually shake the earth/Radiated robot men will stalk each other”).

The inner rot becomes the outer rot, changing our whole physical landscape (“The sun will not be seen and it will always be night/Trees will die/All vegetation will die/Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men/The sea will be poisoned/The lakes and rivers will vanish/Rain will be the new gold”).

Ultimately, the dark forces unleashed by capitalist greed and the crooked timber of humanity will cause the extinction of the human race (“The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind/The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases/And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition/The petering out of supplies/The natural effect of general decay”).

One might expect an elegiac tone to accompany the end of human civilization at the poem’s close, but Bukowski offers serenity as the rest of the cosmos looks on indifferently to the flamed-out drama on the little blue ball (“And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard/Born out of that./The sun still hidden there/Awaiting the next chapter.)

***

The threat of nuclear annihilation hung over the human race during the Cold War (see: the

final scene in the film adaptation of “The Planet of the Apes”), but “Dinosauria, We” was published in 1992, three years after the Berlin Wall fell, in the final book of poetry published in Bukowski’s lifetime (“The Last Night of the Earth Poems”).

Seventy years of life in 20th Century America had convinced Bukowski that the American Dream was a grotesque illusion for most; “Dinosauria, We” appears to be an angry poet’s final howl of despair at human folly. Like the dinosaurs, human beings would become extinct. Unlike the dinosaurs, which were wiped out by a cataclysmic event outside of their control, human beings would die slowly, over many years, by their own hand.

The details of this dark vision were hyperbolic and metaphorical, but the increasingly grim climate change reports which have come out in the twenty years since Bukowski’s death hint that the main message of his alarmist cry may have been sober and prophetic.

           

                                               more Bukowski on Truth and Beauty:

                                                     Charles Bukowski: "Born into This" (full documentary)

                                             Charles Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart"

                                      Charles Bukowski: So You Want to Be a Writer?

                                                Charles Bukowski Gets Life-Affirming

40 years

Forty years ago, I was photographed on my first day of school. 

Shielding my eyes from the bright morning sun, I looked into the camera without the slightest idea of what the future held in store.

Recently I returned to the scene of that photo for a "half time" check-in:  if gene patterns held, half of that future had been lived and half remained. Again I covered my eyes, but now I looked up into a sky that held optimism and promise. 

Three years ago this fall, I took an inspiring writing workshop which redirected my energies from the non-fiction writing I'd done for many years to a then-moribund novel. 

85,000 words and countless re-writes later, I'm in the final stretch of edits, working on a book proposal, and diving into my next venture:  an MFA-Creative Writing program. 

Where will this path lead? 

I honestly don't know. 

Will I become a creative writing teacher? 

Ideally. 

A grant writer? 

Possibly.

An editor in a publishing house? 

Perhaps. 

Will there be opportunities that I can't foresee? 

Undoubtedly. 

What I do know is that I'm excited about the journey.

"Deus ex Machina" and other elements in the Periodic Table of Storytelling

Earlier today I came across "'The Periodic Table of Storytelling' Reveals the Elements of Telling a Good Story" at openculture.com. 

According to the article, the table's creator, James Harris, "has taken all the tropes, archetypes and clichés found in movies (not to mention TV, comic books, literature, video and even professional wrestling) and synthesized them into an elegantly realized chart."

This interactive version of the table allows the reader to peruse 176 tropes in detail. For example, the "Magic A is Magic A" trope has a lengthy main entry, a three-sentence analysis ("This trope is one of the primary advantages some media types have [over] others. Anime and manga, literature, and webcomics usually decide how the magic system works before they even start, and move on from there. Live action are usually much worse about this, and end up fumbling and falling into New Powers as the Plot Demands more."), a "laconic" analysis ("Made-up elements behave consistently"), a "playing with" tab which demonstrates different applications of the trope, quotes about the trope, and last but not least, a discussion board. 

The same exhaustive treatment exists for 175 other tropes, including "Deus ex Machina," "Obstructive Bureaucrat," and "Star-Crossed Lovers." Whatever your favored format(s), The Periodic Table of Storytelling is both a great resource and a window into the rich variety of narratives available to 21st Century storytellers. 

First and last sentences

I like first sentences to snap.

But I'm not religious about it. I'm resistant to hard-and-fast rules about creative processes and much more focused on creating interesting subject matter, a clear, readable narrative flow, and a last sentence that pulls the threads tight or leaves the reader with a lasting impression.

And yet. 

The other day I saw "Lists of the Best Sentences — Opening, Closing, and Otherwise — in English-Language Novels" at openculture.com, and found myself pulled in.  

Included in the piece were links to The American Scholar's ten best sentences, 22 authors' favorite first lines, as well as the 100 best first—and last—lines in fiction, according to the American Book Review.   
Though I haven't read these books in years, the opening sentences in Anna Karenina, Lolita, Ulysses, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Moby Dick had a familiar sparkle and impressed me all over again with their staying power (particularly "Call me Ishmael" from Moby Dick, a three-word sentence which has lasted over 160 years). 

I can't say I was converted to the cult of the opening line, but reviewing these beautiful and timeless sentences was pleasurable, and it did give me something to think about.       

"Do not go gentle into that good night"

The other day at lunch a friend mentioned the imminent passing of a relative who was coming up on 100 years old. 

From this unfortunate news we branched off to a discussion of aging and mortality. My friend said he didn't want to live to be that old, considering the low quality of life for most nonagenarians.

I respected his view--one I've heard many times before--and offered my own, namely the theory that for most of us, our physical erosion is so gradual that we can adapt to working with less. Old age is a long way out in the future; barring an unforeseen illness, I see myself sticking around as long as I can.

Which brought to mind one of my favorite poems these past several decades, a poem that followed me from a dramatic reading in college prep English to a prominent pushpinned spot on my dot.com era cubicle wall to this very moment.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dylan Thomas.

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Charles Bukowski: So You Want to Be a Writer?

This Bukowski poem contains the best, truest advice on writing I've ever seen.

So you want to be a writer?

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything, 
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth 
and your gut,
don't do it. 
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.

if you're doing it for money or 

fame, 

don't do it.

if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of 

you, 

then wait patiently. 

if it never does roar out of you, 

do something else. 

if you first have to read it to your wife 

or your girlfriend or your boyfriend 

or your parents or to anybody at all, 

you're not ready. 

don't be like so many writers, 

don't be like so many thousands of 

people who call themselves writers, 

don't be dull and boring and 

pretentious, don't be consumed with self- 

love. 

the libraries of the world have 

yawned themselves to 

sleep 

over your kind. 

don't add to that. 

don't do it. 

unless it comes out of 

your soul like a rocket, 

unless being still would 

drive you to madness or 

suicide or murder, 

don't do it. 

unless the sun inside you is 

burning your gut, 

don't do it. 

when it is truly time, 

and if you have been chosen, 

it will do it by 

itself and it will keep on doing it 

until you die or it dies in you. 

there is no other way. 

and there never was.

Follow Dan Benbow on Twitter