My Penis And Other Animals: A #whatiwrite Special

‘Children behaaaaaaaaave’. That’s what they say when we’re together.

Why do people buy books? It’s a valid question, when you’re trying to write one and especially when you want an agent or a publisher to take a chance on you. You are not one of Buddha’s special snowflakes. Your excrement has as foul an aroma as the next wannabe writer’s. There is nothing amazing about you. Now, why should someone buy your book? Well, the only answer is: because they think that they’d enjoy reading it.

When you grow up and become the next Stephen King or Dean Koontz, that decision will be (for most readers anyway) made by just having your actual name on the front of the book. People will forgive their favourite author a shitty cover, a boring blurb or (in the case of Stephen King’s Insomnia) a massively rubbish whole first half of the book. That’s the reader faith you build up from years of dishing out the fuck-yeah-awesome.

Until then though, you may have to resort to actually writing something great, in order to catch the eye of Johnny Reader, or Bobby Agent. Or Mary-Jo McPublishinghouse. And by ‘great’, I don’t mean that your writing has to be as good as James Joyce or Herman Melville. Because what even the fuck is good writing? It’s like beauty- it’s subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there’s a consensus on Hideously Ugly. It’s the same with writing.

There is a standard of competency below which everything is Bad Writing (EL James, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer). Above it, everything is Not Bad Writing. And being Not Bad At Writing really guarantees you fuck all. Be it from agents, publishers or the lady in Barnes & Noble with her purse open. Notice how my three examples of writers below the line of competency are world famous, multi-fucking-platinum selling uber-authors.

It doesn’t matter if you can’t write, as long as you have a great idea. Sure, every agent will turn you down, and your book will never be published. You’ll still have a great idea though, and if you wish hard enough, one day you will be JK Rowling. And then you can buy a gold toilet, and some Mexican slaves. The trick is to believe in yourself, because literally NO ONE else does. Reach for the sky. Push the envelope. Push the envelope into the sky, so that other people can’t reach for the envelope.

I think the point I’m making, if any, is that it doesn’t matter who hates what you do, as long as someone loves it. Anyone who sits in judgement over your book or story and tells you in great detail why it’s well written, is usually talking out of his or her arse as much as the people who sit there and tell you how shit it is. No one is qualified to give these critiques (I’m looking at you, 4chan /lit/ board), and they really don’t matter. All that matters is: did you like it? Yes or no. If it’s no, then that’s unfortunate and sad, but I have to move on. I don’t need six paragraphs of guff to qualify what is essentially a matter of taste. I know that I can write, so you pointing out anything technical to me is a waste of time. I won’t respect it. I’m better than you. You’re not going to dissuade me from pursuing this as a career.

I’m only half-serious, obviously. I welcome critique from all quarters. As long as it’s 100% positive, praising and encouraging; contains no negative views about me or my abilities, and has at least a paragraph devoted entirely to praising just how smooth and non-veiny the shaft of my penis is. Once you understand those rules, I’ll throw open the floodgates and let you all have your two cents worth.

Remember: smooth and non-veiny. With a taste not unlike sorbet.

The Truth About Why No One Likes You

I’m 100% certain Piers took the offer to be in this advert at face value and suspected no irony whatsoever.

I was going to write about Being Original today, but I’m sure that’s already been done. What I will talk about, is The Hardest Thing You Will Ever Have To Do As A Writer:

Editing your own manuscript.

I don’t mean going through and finding typos or grammatical silliness; I’m sure your already doing you’re bit in that respect. I’m talking real, honest-to-goodness editing. The difference between 90% of self-published eBooks and Actual Real Books, is that Actual Real Books have been edited by a professional. (And they aren’t about Werewolf Rimming) An editor is the writer’s best friend, and there is one blindingly obvious reason why he has to exist: you cannot edit your own manuscript. No, you can’t. Stop it now. Put that down.

You are too close to your work to be objective. It’s pretty much impossible for you to step outside your massive ego long enough to decide that one piece of prose deserves to be in the final text, but another one is pointless and has to go. So, you can see why your quest to self-publish is fruitless now, right? You’re never going to produce a finished product that’s polished enough to compete with the legitimately published work out there, so you should probably give up now, yeah?

As fucking if.

Unpublished writers are some of the most deluded, blinkered, egomaniacal  fuckheads in the universe. If you don’t believe me, go look on your WordPress reader under the category of ‘Writing’. Strong in these ones, the self-important bollocks is. You bash out 300,000 words about An Ancient Land Of Chivalry And Magic Where Dragons Rim Unicorns, 276,000 of them adverbs ending in ‘ly’, and expect people to read them without turning their eyeballs into spurting hot arcs of face-diarrhoea. You’re going to proceed anyway, and clog the already bursting pipes of ePublishing with the fetid abortion-juice of your trite, sub- Stephenie Meyer creativity. (No, Google Chrome Spell Checker, I didn’t type that incorrectly. The cunt can’t even spell her own first name.) You’re going to go ahead and put out an 1,800 page trilogy of Hunger Games-inspired Bisexual Watersports Slash Fiction, typed entirely on a keyboard that has no letter J. But I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to. I’m here to tell you there’s another way.

The truth is, you’re probably not good enough to be a writer. But hey, lots of published writers aren’t good enough either. A lot of them can’t write for shit. But that doesn’t matter, because an agent liked his or her book, and thought he could sell it. The publishing people liked his or her literary voice, and hooked him or her up with a good editor, and now he or she is selling a million copies a month. See all those bits where you wanted to correct my ‘his or her’ to ‘their’? You were wrong, and that’s why you’re probably not good enough to be a writer. Unless you get yourself an editor.

I don’t have an editor. Sure, I have sex with an editor. That doesn’t help me though; she’s an editor for children’s books. It does help with the sex though; she often dresses up like Stephanie from Lazy Town. Mmmmmm, Spermticus. Anyway, I’m going to edit my own book. In fact, I’ve already done it. How? Well I just checked my ego at the door:

Every time my main character/any character said something pointless that was only in the book to make people go ‘Oooooh, isn’t he a good writer!’, out the fuck it went. Every time I’d put some words in there that were just filler, out the fuck they went. (Like my narrator saying ‘This was true’ after someone made a statement. ‘This was true’ is an opinion, not a fact. Out!) If it didn’t tell you something about the character, about the plot or about something important, out the fuck it went. If it was navel-gazing, pointless scene-setting, opinion, cliché, not essential to the story, out, out OUT!

I realise that for some of you guys, following this advice would leave you with about 20% of your book. But, that’s because your book is fucking terrible. That’s what an editor would tell you, and that’s what you’ll never tell yourself. You’re not as amazing as I am. You can’t do that thing up there, where I checked my ego at the door. You don’t have it in you to do the ‘Out, out OUT!’ thing. You’re not me. That’s why you need an editor.

In some completely unrelated news, I am now available to edit manuscripts. Extremely reasonable rates. Apply within.

Licking The Other Side Of The Battery

Sometimes I just don’t have anything to say that’s worth saying. I know that in the blogosphere, this is often no barrier to publishing; Jesus, some of you cunts publish three or four blogs a day, usually just to tell me how you have nothing to write about. I’m trying to be different, though. Trying to have some integrity. And I’m fucking lazy, obviously.

I’m not lazy, per se. I just look lazy. Same goes for my C.V/Résumé. That isn’t actually empty; it just looks empty. So yeah, I’ve been in a sort of Editing Hell for the last month. This has consisted of some very intermittent spell checking, continuity editing and dialogue polishing. I also was the Best Man at a wedding where everyone expected me to deliver the goods with my after-dinner speech. Somewhere along the way a Google fault, followed by a clean sweep of my laptop’s temp files, led to me losing 2,000 words of final draft text. It was clearly a surprise attack by Karma/Fate/God, to avenge all the hilariously sexist remarks I’ve ever made about women being no good with computers. I did the real life equivalent of Chandler Erasing Ross’ Keynote Speech. I might as well be your dad, downloading mywebsearch toolbars in exchange for a ninety second clip called ‘BRACES TEEN HUMILIATION DOG BUKAKKE ILLEGAL RUSSIAN MPG’.

I’ve just about got back in the swing of things now, which is why I’m able to write the blog again. I’ve regained the ability to write, and I’m rollercoastering through the text, often stopping to make up words like ‘rollercoastering.’ It’s important that I got my mojo back first though. I couldn’t come here empty-handed and talking about ‘Being A Writer’. Jesus, I’m self-employed, registered for tax as a full-time writer and I’ve written an 80,000 word novel, and I still don’t feel comfortable calling myself a writer. It sounds wrong, and pretentious and insincere. Luckily for me, the rest of the internet doesn’t fucking trouble itself with such humilities. My hiatus from blogging has been mainly spent reading the God-awful blogs of others, mentally spell-checking the inane/insane ramblings of The Most Uninteresting People To Ever Own Computers and learning a valuable lesson:

It doesn’t matter what they do; it only matters what you do.

I was spending far too much time getting furious at the horse shit other people were putting out; being  appalled at the self-delusion of people for whom elementary school grammar is but a far-off dream; seething at the gullibility and low standards of the people who follow/love said idiots. That’s no good. That’s just wasted energy. Other people have always been cunts; it’s not a new invention. Oscar Wilde’s entire body of work is basically him using his bottomless pool of wit and wisdom to say ‘People, eh? WHAT A BUNCH OF SPACKERS.’  It doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t affect you. Even if you become the greatest writer on earth, Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown and EL James will all sell more than you. Tiao Cruz and Flo Rida will probably sell more records than Jeff Buckley. Do you see Jeff drowning in self-pity? No, because he drowned in a river.

So, from now on, I’m concentrating on the positives. That’s how to keep the creative spark going; hate will only take you so far. You cannot write a sympathetic character with a mind full of negativity. Every time I have a negative thought, I’ll exhale slowly and push it out of my conscious  stream, keeping it clear for me to float on down. Every time I hear a criticism, I’ll try to find the constructive value in it, even if none was meant. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still be calling people cunts and making inappropriate jokes about children’s vaginas. But I’ll be doing it positively. I dunno, I’ll wear a fucking smiley face t-shirt or something.