Thursday, August 21, 2008

Today's Advice For Writers



This outburst after I came across like the fifty-thousandth fucking blog via Twitter from someone who put "writer" in his or her description with an URL and the fucking URL leads to a fucking blog where they blog about how they're not fucking writing!

This is what a writer is like:
In Atlanta, Georgia, he lived in a tar-paper shack lit by a single bulb. He was still trying to write, but the stories kept coming back from the New York magazines and he allowed himself to starve rather than get a regular job, believing that writing would save him, like the deluded hero of Knut Hamsun's *Hunger*, another favorite novel. Atlanta was the nadir of Bukowski's time on the road, almost the end of him. Sick with hunger, he wrote to his father asking for money and, after getting a long letter of admonishment by reply, he considered committing suicide by touching a live electric wire. Then he noticed the blank margins on his newspaper and began writing in them. Looking at his life in retrospect, he said this was the moment that proved he was a writer. Although nobody would ever read what he had written, he felt compelled to scribble something.

-- Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life - the biography by Howard Sounes

He was starving and alone and existing in a shack! A shack!

You are sitting in front of a screen, you must have electricity, shelter, not a shack, sufficient food -- and you piss the opportunity away.

That is why you are not and never will be a writer!

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