Writing About Writing

People have been asking me for writing advice a lot lately. All I really have to say is just start typing until you’re done, and make sure none of what you’re typing is bullshit. The first part takes until whenever your deadline is, and the second part takes your entire life.

I can’t be a hypocrite though. My relationship with writing is dysfunctional. It’s usually a fight against swearing it off forever, and half the time I lose. But it can be fun when it starts to feel like playing music. Finding a line that you know belongs to you, getting into a groove, and playing for you, not the audience (every few days I have to rediscover that the last part is the only way to ever in a million years do anything).

But I’m starting to appreciate how odd it is that I’ve had a writing career. I did not grow up thinking that was a job you could do, and I mostly read comic strips. I kind of wanted to be in the newspaper business because they got to be inside and it’s hot outside. And I sucked at math so accounting was out. My grandparents always had country music going, and my grandma taught me Roger Miller was a writer because he got to sing all this goofy shit nobody else was going to write for him. That was about it.

Then I went to college (my application essay was some give me money garbage about not wanting to be an illiterate hillbilly) and the only teacher who didn’t hate my guts taught a class on American realism. I wrote an essay about An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and he wrote “wow!” and it was the only A I got. Then I started to actually meet writers and they were all stupid assholes so I thought hey, this is a scam I might be able to do. I don’t have the stomach for regular crimes.

With that in mind, here is the writing advice I have:

1. Don’t die. A lot of people get tripped up here, because dying is really easy. The trick is to eat and sleep at roughly the same time everybody else does, take walks, and do laundry. 
2. Write like people talk in real life. Do this by listening to people talk all the time. When you’ve written something, read it aloud and if you think “that sounds stupid,” that means it is.
3. Listen to a ton of music and read poetry. This will give you rhythm and meter. I’ve written whole articles to the tune of specific songs that were stuck in my head. It also gives you structure because you get a sense that it’s time to head for the chorus.
4. It doesn’t have to be short but write like it is. Lonesome Dove is the shortest 900 page book you’ll ever read.
5. Write the version that sucks and do it really fast. John Swartzwelder gave that advice once. In the morning you can pretend some jerk wrote it and after that you just have to clean up after him.
6. Be honest. Lying is fine but it takes too much concentration.
7. If a line just arrives in your head like it came from somewhere else, write it down immediately, meditate on it, and make it the foundation of whatever you’re building.
8. Watch a lot of comedy. It’s good for rhythm, editing, and surprising people. It falls apart when it’s not tight. If you make yourself laugh you’ll feel like a genius.
9. Read the actual Bible a lot. It’s the first real book and everybody rips it off, so you’ll secretly learn a bunch of rules.
10. Booze and drugs are a crutch and prove you’re too chickenshit to actually do the job. You had to invent some other guy.
11. If you have a favorite book that makes you want to read, steal from it as much as you want all the time. Throw a brick through the window and empty out the cash register. 
12. Figure out what kind of writing you don’t like, anthropomorphize it, and write like you’re going to burn its house down.
13. Do some old-fashioned actual reporting of an event; local paper type shit. You’ll learn how to gather details and listen to people. People constantly say insane things. It’s also kind of not rewarding at all so you learn when something is just done and be glad it’s dead.
14. If you’re talking about writing, you’re not writing.
15. Get a time machine and go back to 1995 when you’re seven years old and just piss away all your time on the internet getting into arguments on message boards, then do that for ten years straight. You will develop prison muscles and you’ll be a good thief.
16. GIve yourself a time limit and word count for writing something and actually hit it even if you have to screw it up so bad that your own mother will lose respect for you and you’ll seriously begin to question why anyone would ever do this for a living and wouldn’t it be nicer to just go outside and look at cloud formations or maybe even nothing and just feel normal again just for a couple minutes and later you can get in a car and drive around the deserted part of town where the cops don’t go and break the speed limit or head into oncoming traffic as a goof and play obnoxious music way too loud and sing along in a cruel imitation of the voice of Johnny Cash then maybe go to the Fosters Freeze to get a cheeseburger but I’m just kidding about that part because you’re writing which means you have no money unless you have a trust fund and if you have a trust fund why don’t you just go do something normal like white collar crime and develop a horrifying but manageable drug addiction or buy a perfectly stupid car and maybe say you’re a conceptual artist while you’re at it