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ICBWB
My Slant on the Writing Life
My friend, I appear before you (metaphorically), dressed in my white button-down shirt, black slacks, shiny black shoes, riding a cheap bicycle too small for me, and beaming a benevolently dopey smile, because I am a man on a mission.
My friend, my words appear before your eyes (literally), laden with a message of the utmost and mostut importance.
The message is this:
WRITING SUCKS! DON’T TRY IT!
My friend. Trust me. Hear not the echoes from my past life of sin-filled decadence including 10 years lived in the most sinful-filled decadent of places, Manhattan, wherein I did waste my once-in-a-lifetime Life writing, writing, writing. Pay no attention to the faint echoes of suspicion that all New Yorkers bury the message, “Go to hell!” in the directive, “Trust me!” (Or that Midwesterners bury the message, “Go to hell!” in the directive, “Have a nice day!”)
Read now the message that shall set you free: Writing sucks! Try it not!
My friend, save yourself! To writing, just say, “No!” Be afraid. Be very afraid! Fall prey not to the hubris of thinking you can write just once, for the adventure, the experience, and then walk away from it spiritually unscarred. Or that, once writing, you could quit any time you wanted. I beg of you, practice abstinence. (You’ll receive government funding, as well as not lose your Eternal Soul.) For the only safe writing, my friend, is no writing.
Oh, how writing sucks! Let me count the ways.
Writing is lonely; writers spend many hours of their once-in-a-lifetime lives sitting alone and staring at blank pages of paper or blank computer screens; writing is a struggle at best, and a CIA inflicted waterboarding at worst; writers are all poor, have unfilled cavities, and only experience moments of semi-sobriety during their Alcoholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous and Weight Watchers meetings.
Truth be told, I have, as perhaps have you, managed to live most of my once-in-a-lifetime Life without the faintest glimmering of this Truth. Oh, the years I wasted, in my egocentric ignorance, writing, writing, writing, almost every blessed day. And in the darkness of my sin-filled decadence, I was so lost beyond reach that while writing, writing, writing, I had a blast doing it.
Until my moment of enlightenment.
My moment of enlightenment was this:
Last week, whilst sitting in a café in Solana Beach, writing on my laptop computer, some guy sat down at the table across from mine. He flipped open his laptop computer and began writing. On the opened cover of his computer was a large black and white label. (All life changing evangelical messages come to us in black-and-white, never in color.) The message on that black-and-white label stuck to the back of that fellow traveler’s computer would forever shift my perspective on the once-in-a-lifetime Life I have wasted on writing. It read:
SURFING SUCKS! DON’T TRY IT!
In a flashing flash of understanding, I understood.
I understood why it was that every writer I’ve ever known is forever telling anyone who will listen how difficult, how demanding, how demeaning, how demented, how degrading, and how utterly disheartening it is to write, and to be a writer.
I finally got what these writers had got: The fewer folks who write, the more uniquer I become! The fewer folks writing, the more likelier that publishers, having no one more better to turn to, will turn more to me! The fewer folks who write, the more I will be read, the more revered, and the more steamy emails I will receive from women too lazy to go out and meet real, non-writing, men!
Fired up with my new found fundamental evangelical revelation, I have since that moment been wandering the streets and the internet to spread the holy words: WRITING SUCKS! DON’T TRY IT!
Now.
You may hear a pernicious vicious counter message, claiming that, like our brother and sister Real True Surfers, we Real True Writers, such as my humble self, having discovered and purchased real estate in Paradise, now want nothing more than to keep everyone else out.
My friend, go to hell. I mean, trust me! As I currently only rent a studio apartment in Paradise, you can trust me. I will give you the Real Truth.
Here again, in case you missed it, is the Real Truth:
WRITING SUCKS! DON’T TRY IT!
Unless.
Or.
Except.
When.
You are writing what you most want to write and what only you and no one else who has ever lived or who will ever live can write.
Because.
When you write what you most want to write and what only you and no one else who has ever lived or who will ever live can write, unlike writing as a job and writing for hire—
WRITING IS A BLAST! DO TRY IT!
The Loophole in The Truth: when we choose to spend the moments, minutes, hours and days of our once-in-a-lifetime-Life doing what we most passionately want to do—whether that is writing or flipping hamburgers—it is a blast. It is a joy. It is a trip.
Speaking of trips, I will now, before I get back on my cheap and too small bicycle to pedal to my next door-to-door conversion, give to you a like wow totally free Road Map For the Writing Life! (This is an exclusive offer. You won’t find this map on MapQuest or Google Maps.)
BEGIN the journey by writing what you most want to write and what only you and no one else who has ever lived or ever will live can write. On your journey, if you should ever find yourself writing but not enjoying it, STOP. Whenever you find yourself writing and enjoying it, GO. For all the times between, when you are writing but neither miserable nor having a blast, proceed, but with CAUTION. Always YIELD to the impulse to write, or to not write. If you come to a DEAD END, make a quick U-TURN onto EASY STREET so you will get back to enjoying whatever you are writing.
For the secret truth embedded in all the wicked lies of this message is: If you ain’t enjoying what you’re writing, no one else will either. Same is true about flipping hamburgers. (Which explains why fast food sucks and you should not try it: no one making fast food, from the CEO up to the janitor, is enjoying making it. They're just in it for the money.)
My friend, the writing life is no different from the non-writing life. If writing is a struggle, you’re out of alignment. And no chiropractor can get you back into alignment. Only you can. And the only way you can re-align your writing self, is to STOP writing, wipe away the drops of blood oozing from your forehead, and go out and do some Living.
Whilst out Living, throw yourself into anything and anyone that comes easy to you. Have a blast. Make love, see a movie, hear music, taste amazing slow food, go bowling, ride a bicycle in the middle of the road in the middle of a moonlit summer night, smell the flowers, hell, roll in the flowers, sit on a park bench planning Total World Domination, research gamma rays, go surfing.
And.
If.
After 30 minutes or 3 years of Living, you feel a persistent twitch of desire to maybe possibly write, do not resist, for resistance is futile!
Give in.
Write.
But please, honor your fellow writers in the Paradise to which you have now been admitted and protect our Paradise by diligently and fervently telling anyone who will listen:
WRITING SUCKS! DON’T TRY IT!
Other ICBWB Slants on Writing by David Boyne
To Read Slants by David Boyne on Everything BUT Writing, visit, at your own risk: