THE WRITER’S HANDBOOK
A GUIDE FOR AUTHORS OLD AND YOUNG, NEW AND ESTABLISHED, LIVING AND DEAD
THE DANGERS OF READING
Reading is the opposite of writing. For every page you read, there’ll be ten you won’t write. So, stop.
Don’t read. Ever.
The easiest way to break the reading habit is to refuse to do it.
My Anti-Reading Program:
1. Don’t.
2. Read.
3. Ever.
Not ready for that? Here’s a simpler one:
1. Stop.
2. Reading.
Reading comes in many forms. Signs, posters, and flyers often involve reading. Pamphlets, brochures, magazines and books often have a major reading component. However, it is the reading of guides such as this one that is by far the most concentrated, dangerous form of reading.
So-called helpful self-help guides can be found almost anywhere, but the greatest concentrations are found on: The Internet.
The Internet is where anti-writers gather to make knots of their optic nerves bowing down to information idols. It’s a church for idiots. A perfectly good writer innocently visits The Internet, and is never heard of again. To make matters worse, most of it is available at no cost. It’s an opium den where the opium is free, an open arsenal of intellectual indolence, a stockpile of potential stupidity, mental oblivion, and psychological sedation.
Reading does to writing what guns do to murder victims, what dogs do to homework, what rain does to firecrackers.
Listen to the rain—it doesn’t read. You’ll certainly never catch the rain on The Internet. The rain spends its time thinking, falling from the clouds, and writing. Be like the rain.
Still addicted to The Internet? Get plywood. Carry a small piece in your pocket. Keep a medium one in your bag. Put a large slab on your desk. When tempted to browse, stare at that plywood. Eventually, your mind will think of new, exciting things to write about.
It’s not just The Internet. Other things to avoid include mirrors, framed art, books, TV shows, comedy cellars, and other displays of introspection.
Put yourself in God’s shoes. You won’t find God on The Internet, or hanging around a library. God doesn’t even have a library card. God is a writer, one of the best.
Imagine a world without libraries or The Internet, where everyone is writing and no one is reading.
SUBTLE SKILLS
Anyone can learn the art of writing, but art alone doesn’t make a good writer; it only makes a good editor. The quality, depth and power of your writing will be determined by the construction of your life. Build your life like a swift ship. Toss your junk into the sea. Take your life by the wheel. Steer straight through storms and never stray from course. If you do this, you’ll become strong, fast and ready for anything. You’ll be a streamlined vessel—sharp and efficient. You’ll be a glass rocket soaring over the desert, travelling at the speed of light, approaching direct contact between your soul, the universe, and your writing.
If you want to be a writer, take steps into unchartered territory. Coerce your soul into new places. If you don’t know which way to go, just go any way you can, but don’t sit there, make a move, spin the spinner, roll the dice. Life is a game and it’s your turn.
Do whatever it takes to get a pen, typewriter, or computer in front of you. If necessary, tell yourself that you’re relaxed when you’re not. Act nonchalant towards a blank page. It’s not really all that hard to trick yourself into a state of carefree independence. Let your first careless words flow as if ink was cheap.
Don’t be clever. Being clever is overrated, and it never really got anyone anywhere. What matters is that you sit down to write. What matters is that you stopped thinking for long enough to say something—anything. Eventually, after you bang out a bunch of gibberish, you’ll say something really good.
All conversations matter. Nothing is unimportant. People and events will appear before you offering fuel for your imagination and opportunities to think with new parts of your brain. Everything said around you influences your writing. Pay attention to what is said. Listen to what’s going on. It’s gold.
Consider the words of Mr. Ragone, my 7th-grade English teacher. He scrawled the following on one of my papers: “I wish you would stop writing garbage like this and pull yourself together.” Old Ragone was trying to tell me I needed to aim lanterns of rope at the dark fabric of the present tense. He wanted me to respect the moment—it’s the only one that’s happening. Everything else is a cotton ball in a cube, a buried kickball, a circle trapped inside a square. Some kids would have told Ragone to take a hike. Not me. I pulled myself together. I became an intellectual harpoon.
Fame and obscurity offer serious, but opposite challenges for writers. Fame can spoil a writer quickly. Endless obscurity causes a writer to atrophy.
A writer must find balance. A writer must dance on fine lines.
If you’re rich, that’s okay. You can still be a writer, but first you have to get rid of your money. Not all of it—just most of it. The best way to do this is to give it away. You can give it to anyone. Feel free to mail it to me. However you do it is fine, but do it anonymously so you can move on.
If you’re poor, that’s okay too. You can still be a writer, but first you have to get on the business end of some business. That means work. Don’t go crazy—just work a little. After you get paid, reach into your pockets and buy your freedom from the slavery-joke that’s keeping you shelved like a book in a library. Use that money to pull your head out of the bucket, and write.
You can’t write pointing a gun at your head. You can’t write wasted on candy. In other words, be good to yourself. Be your own parent. Don’t spoil or bully yourself. Find a balance that’s directed and caring, serious and flexible.
Balance is tricky business, but completely possible.
A writer approaches the podium, taps the microphone, and begins. A writer has something to say. A writer has seen things in dreams that no one has seen. A writer dares to live despite the angel of death. A writer doesn’t take bribes for silence. A writer writes despite offers from all corners to do otherwise.
Words will come in unstoppable torrents.
STYLE
If you want to be a writer, go your own way. Wash your lucky spoon in a magic river. Wake up in the middle of the night and look for ghosts in a strange forest. When you finally find your glasses, keys or whatever it is that you’re missing, praise the God of Missing Things and be glad you’re a writer. You may soon find the things you’re truly missing. You may find the secret that every writer discovers when they craft their ultimate masterpiece:
On the beaches along the stream of consciousness—there on the shore in the moonlight before dawn—you’ll meet up with your real self, shake hands and laugh about all the many ways your paths have strayed.
Look at the other animals. Do any of them write? No, of course not. Don’t be an animal. Be a writer.
Walk into the night without a flashlight and beat the bushes. If your mind has something to say, don’t listen. Leave it behind and go out with your soul. Get lost in the dark hills. Be a mayor without a megaphone. Let your hands go cold. Move on from forms and formatting. Let the water flow where it wants. Don’t share a bunk with snoring boredom. Go hunting with the wolves. The lion’s asleep and ready to eat. Eat the lion—mane and all. Fire your deadly weapons, beat your swords senseless and blow your pens into the plowshares of the present. Don’t sharpen your mind on rock candy. Don’t grease your wheels with salt.
You’ll never see an old brick building asking for directions. Old brick buildings know exactly where to go. If you put your mind to it, you can be just like an old brick building and figure out which way to go.
Aim yourself at skimming today’s cream off the sour milk of yesterday’s troubles. In other words, make your life a perpetual motion machine. Use all your mistakes as fuel. Leave no stone unturned. As the gas you burn becomes the gas you need and the more you bite off, the more you chew, you’ll move faster and faster.
If you want to be a writer, keep ahead of the biggest wave, stay up on your surfboard and ride that doomsday roller like a superhero.
Your life is a joke, so take it seriously. If you don’t, you’ll just end up reading, sleeping, looking at mirrors and eating sardines for breakfast. If you want to be a writer, you can’t take fake vacations into simulated sunsets. You can’t believe anything a therapist tells you.
You have to charge the bull, throw lightening at the sky, stop reading and get up from that couch.
The pacifists are wrong. There is an enemy. You have to fight. It’s not the enemy that the warmongers claim. It’s the dark gravity that comes from looking at mirrors, reading, or watching TV. That dark gravity will drag you down.
Be straight with the people in your life. But to yourself, you have to lie frequently. Shakespeare had it backwards. It’s not to thine own self be true. It’s the other way around.
Every moment that you’re alive is a great opportunity. Don't fight the disco. Don’t wallflower into the wallpaper. Roll up your sleeves and give civilization the spanking it needs. No more books, no more TV and no more sleeping. You’re God’s gift to creation.
God made a covenant not to flood the world again. But there are so many, many other ways that God could destroy the world—earthquakes, hurricanes, tidal waves. You could save the world from God’s wrath. Wash those rainbows out of your eyes and find metaphors for every bit of trouble that threatens to bottle your juice. Don’t throw your rollers in the snow. If snow is on all channels or snow is in your moat, just leave the snow for the moment and surround yourself with hopeful bowls of nature’s blows. Then sit there with a pen. In that moment of peace, the words will rise, pound thunder into stone and grind your grain into the flour of finding.
PHYSICAL HEALTH
If you want to be a writer, get on the writer’s diet and stay on it forever. The diet is simple: for breakfast, eat dessert; for lunch, eat one apple; for dinner, eat steak and eggs. Eat a raw carrot before dinner and another one afterwards. Put black pepper and salt on the eggs and horseradish on the steak.
If you want to be a writer, don’t do any kind of exercise that involves your body, especially Yoga. Exercise will only make you feel good. That’s dangerous. You can’t write if you feel good. Time spent doing exercise would be better spent writing about how terrible you feel.
As you settle into a life without exercise, waves of physical pain will wash over you like a shower of acid, a false alarm. You’ll be a nest in a storm, a rock in a river, a hydrant in heat.
The feelings you get from writing are the only valid feelings—everything else is just a mirage.
If you want to be a writer, you need to stop thinking about danger. You’re not a wild onion. You’re not a saw. You’re a rancher in heat. You’re a golden copy of the sun. You don’t need crutches of grass or advertisements for trouble. You have good strong legs. Keep thinking about danger, and you’ll end up like a sandstone monkey giggling behind an office building. Take the high road. Leave thinking about danger to robots and possums.
Once you’ve gotten your head out of the bucket and been on the writer’s diet for a while, it’s time to trust your mind. Advice is the easy trade of soothsayers, therapists, and professors. You don’t need any of it. Trust yourself. The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll make a major mistake. A life riddled with catastrophic errors is better than a life of none. If you want to be a writer, you’ll have to accept that you’re fine. You’ve already recovered from your traumas. You can end your relationship with the mental health industry. Those jerks will keep you spinning in circles forever. They’re laughing all the way to the bank while you cry your eyes out over problems that don’t exist anymore. That’s not to say that you don’t have real problems. You do. YOU HAVE REAL PROBLEMS. You and the whole world are full of real problems. If you got up off that couch, you could solve them with your writing.
Your ancestors have a lot they want to say, but they can’t talk because they’re dead. You could be their voice, but first, you need to understand that it’s your ancestors who are dead, not you. You need to stop lying in a grave next to them. There are things your ancestors didn’t get a chance to say. Their words could fill infinite pages. So, get up and listen. Once you start relaying what they say, you’ll become even more alive than you are now. You’ll become so alive, you’ll be the opposite of dead. As a result, your connection to your ancestors will become even stronger, and they will be proud.
Don’t surrender the fortune of danger that brews in your gloom. Hold that gold between the sacred walls of perpetual midnight deep in the keep of your mind.
If you want to be a writer, become a parent and spend your free time trying to keep the house clean. By doing this you’ll leave yourself with little time to write. That may seem like a problem, but it’s not. Good things come in small packages. In those short moments after the dishes are done and the kids are asleep and the toys and the towels are back where they belong, when you only have a few minutes before you pass out exhausted from the day’s demands, it’s then that your pearls of wisdom will roll off your tongue like so many loads of laundry.
If you wanted to be a writer, but then lost interest: THINK AGAIN. You probably just got too much exercise, too much sleep, or need to get back on the writer’s diet. You’re the perfect person to share your thinking. You have a lot to offer. Your words could move mountains.
Writers complain. Non-writers suffer.
If you want to be a writer, surround yourself with unfinished projects, tasks that need completion. By not getting them done, and instead spending your time at your typewriter, you will create better works. Keep ignoring the weeds in the garden or those light fixtures you still haven’t installed. Procrastinating on matters of practical productivity, beauty and order is a sacrifice to the God of Literature. That God will reward you tenfold.
THE DANGERS OF SLEEPING
If you want to be a writer, stop sleeping. I’m not kidding. I stopped sleeping years ago. Now look at me: a golden copy of the sun, an intellectual harpoon, stunning on a brick sundae, and making my way into the brash chastity of a reckless feck.
What’s the secret to these triumphs? It all comes from not sleeping. Not a wink. Not a blink. Not an eyelash in the milk.
Sleep is more than unnecessary. It’s dangerous. Sleep will only make you sleepy.
Instead of sleeping, try laying down at night in a dark room in a bed with your eyes closed for eight hours. How is that not sleeping? Your body may be motionless, your eyes may be closed, and you may appear to the casual observer to be in a dead slumber. Behind your eyelids, you are FULLY awake inside your dream world.
To wake up in your dreams, keep a notebook, pen and flashlight next to your bed. Before you lay your head on the pillow, make the decision that you will get up several times to quickly write down every detail you can recall about your dreams. Then do it. Don’t lay there half-awake thinking about it. Sit up and go right to work, write everything down as fast as you can.
During the day, keep an eye out for stickers. For example, there are often stickers stuck to produce. Whenever you find one, stop what you’re doing and take it as a sign. Bring the sticker to your dream notebook and attach it to the cover. Eventually, this will make the cover into a mosaic.
Carry your dream notebook wherever you go, or if that’s not practical, put the sticker on a piece of wax paper and attach it to the notebook later. Eventually, you’ll start dreaming about stickers. When you find a sticker in a dream, do the same thing that you do during the day: affix the dream sticker to the dream cover of your dream notebook. Then open it and read about the dreams you’ve had in the dream world. The dream notes you read in your dreams will include mentions of finding stickers, taking them to notebooks, and reading about dreams within dreams within dreams.
The details of your dreams aren’t irrelevant, but at the same time, they don’t matter all that much. Therapists overinflate the significance of dreams. What matters is that you’re building bridges between worlds. What matters is that you’re awake all the time, never sleeping, even when you lie in bed at night with your eyes closed.
FALLING IN LOVE
There are advantages to being idolized, not feeling out of control, not feeling crushed out—but not for a writer. If you want to be a writer, fall fully in love. Writers atrophy in one-way or lukewarm partnerships. If you want to be a writer, get into a romantic relationship with someone who challenges you, and with whom there is a mutual devastating infatuation. Avoid fans and admirers. It will help your writing if you regularly feel bent out of shape with passion and/or lost in a dangerous forest of trouble.
LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE
While speed and accuracy with spelling and grammar will happen naturally over time, it's important that you are somewhat deliberate and committed to the ongoing work of sharpening these skills. You must become both relaxed and competent with the mechanics of language.
If you want to be a writer, accept that you're a kind of athlete. Keeping in shape is essential to making touchdowns and home runs. But a writer is also like a fine carpenter. If you’re terrified of losing a finger to your saw, your work will be limited. If you run wild, you'll lose your hands. In other words, don’t be preoccupied with editing while writing, but at the same time, the mechanics are important. Your pen is no less dangerous than a lathe.
Many writers lose their fingers due to a popular attitude that grammar and spelling are skills for nerds and lawyers. Find a balance. Don't be a snooty poet allergic to rules. Don't polish everything into a mountain of sawdust. Let your work flow from the well-oiled machine of a balanced relationship with wordsmithery.
If you want to be a writer, stop using commas, where they’re not needed; learn to use commas correctly, but don’t worry about commas too much, but also don’t go overboard, so, like, you know, it gets to the point that it’s a distraction, or, heaven forbid, stupid.
If you want to be a writer, write radio plays, and record them with your friends. Radio theater is a more powerful and maturing experience than producing film or a staged play. Plus, it’s far cheaper, easier, and more time-efficient. In the absence of visuals, radio theater strikes at the subconsciousness more intensely because sound is a more primal medium, one we experience at a younger age than the visual forms.
THE FINAL STEP
If you want to be a writer, assume you have an unbreakable spirit and give away every bit of your energy. Don’t conserve your strength. Fly full speed into the sun. At the end of your long day, when you sit there at your table with blank paper: PAUSE. If you feel empty like you have nothing, like your pen has run out of ink, like your soul has gone blank—be still and wait. It will come. Like the tide, it will come. Unstoppable rivers of your thinking will fill volumes of chapters and pages of words. You’ll move beyond the fear of exhaustion. You’ll become the human miracle.
You’ll be a writer.
Incredible. So good, in fact, that I didn't even feel guilty for reading it. I hope this gets published in a book form.