howtobecomeawriter

How to Become a Writer Part 4

NSP Meditations, Writing , , ,

The final and most important step on how to become a writer is this: embrace the fact that you didn’t choose the subject, the subject chose you. It waylaid you. It flattened you on a lonely desert highway, like a scene from a cartoon.

You must write on this subject with pure instinct and without any regard to conventional literary wisdom. Of course, you will have read all the prison literature, but you will never emulate a single word of its various styles or themes because that would constitute utter cliché and you are no hack writer because you haven’t become a writer yet!

(Note to potential writer: never, ever, use the cliched phrase “going down the rabbit hole” to describe anything unknown, let alone the experience of belonging in The Registry. A rabbit hole by definition has a purpose and leads to a toasty warren where there are cute, carrot-chomping, furry creatures capable of nuzzling love and serving as sweet characters in children’s stories. No, that’s not The Registry at all.)

Be bold! Cut your long hair and tear down the pillars! You must consider yourself the greatest avant-garde writer on the subject of The Registry that has ever existed. Write what ever drifts through your transom. Use words like transom. Write completely without narrative structure, let alone with a coherent narrator. Go gonzo if necessary. Go William Burroughs and cut-ups. Go Oprah. Take Annie Dillard’s advice and write the book you want to read. If you have to culturally appropriate, then do it! Steal rain. Steal human misery. Steal Stevie Wonder. Line up the wheelbarrows and start hauling away as many nameless stories from the Gulag as possible.

Above all, you must take a radical approach to the material and never compromise…unless a publisher asks you to sell out. Then you will sell out and sell out fast because you need the money and because Joan Didion once wrote: writers are always selling out someone somewhere. But that’s okay—that writer is you!

It’s going to be hard, this becoming-a-writer proposition. Dedicate all remaining emotional and financial reserves into the project. Go to the brink. Go for it. Go Kafka! Go over the middle. Go into the fifth set on clay. (Note sports metaphors.)

Make this one last final stab, with everything finally riding on it, your livelihood, reputation, humanity and mortality. Give this How to Become a Writer dream everything you possibly have, but don’t be delusional either. Realize it’s probably not going to work out with this subject, because nobody, not a single person in the publishing world wants to touch it.

Touch. You just used the word touch. That was funny and morbid, in a Woody Allen-Manhattan sort of funny and morbid way. Good, keep the humor moving, put your ass in the chair, crank up the Thin Lizzy, and get to it! It’s a long way to the bottom if you want to rock and roll.

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How to Become a Writer Part 3

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Besides murky, menacing bureaucracies, Kafka also wrote about cockroaches. If you really, really, want to learn how to become a writer and escape The Registry, you might want to read him because he clearly foretold what being a member is all about. He didn’t write all that much, either, so it shouldn’t take that long and his books are on tape. Kafka goes well late at night, by candlelight, with tea or stout or tincture and dropping the adjective “Kafkaesque” in a future query letter might impress a literary agent who has never read Kafka, either. So bone up! And remember, Woody Allen once used the adjective to great comedic effect in one of his funny movies and that you watched an episode of Baywatch in jail surrounded by other members of The Registry and any writer worth his salt peter should be able to turn that into a humorous moment of Kafkaesque experience.

Speaking of Woody Allen, at least the late 70’s Woody Allen, it is important for you to inject humor into your story at all costs. Any kind of humor, even pratfalls. The Registry, if it is anything, is the ultimate American black French existential comedy that no one is laughing at or with because the performances take place under bridges and in windowless rooms papered with inspirational statements ripped off from exterminated Native American tribes.

The crucial third step is next. It requires your full attention and full acceptance: as soon as you join The Registry, you will be relegated, cast out, ditched, exiled, marooned, shunned, ostracized, abandoned, discarded, blackballed. Pariah status then ensues—instantly, totally. You are a full-fledged social pariah, a leper. Be forewarned, all of this unfolds in silence but it does make a sound, like a tree falling in a rain forest with no one around to hear it. That tree will eventually rot, but, unlike ecology in a real forest, the log that You Are, won’t nurse life. It probably won’t even decompose. It will petrify.

What a metaphor! Super fluid and complex! It even obliquely references a Salinger anti-hero classic! Would-be writers need complex metaphors to enrich their prose. They often provide subconscious hope for humanity in discerning readers.

The metaphor of the fallen, rotting tree may sound bleak, hopeless, terminal, but scratch beneath the moss and bark and you will discover that…there is nothing else there. The tree really is dead and not cultivating any new life. There is no ecology whatsoever in this because ecology depends on natural collaboration. Pariahs have no collaborators.

But consider this your LUCKY BREAK! Eternal status as a social pariah means eternal solitude. No partner, girlfriend, boyfriend, lover, or naturally, a collaborator. Welcome celibacy and monasticism. You’re going to be alone forever, not counting the dog. This is perfect for your writing. You also have another excellent advantage working for you: membership in The Registry means exclusion from almost every job in American society that you qualify for or interests you. Thus, a job will never pose a distraction! A real writer can’t have distractions! You’ll have all the time in the world to sit you ass in the chair (or stand up like Thomas Wolfe and Rilke) and write. There are pesky issues of eating and paying the rent, but you’re smart, creative, have an extensive vocabulary, and knowledge of edible wild foods. It will all work out somehow or you will simply die. (Be sure to make the death very poignant, verging on poetic. In the note, sprinkle in some arcane literary references, and of course, metaphors.)

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

How to Become a Writer Part 2

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The second step on how to become a writer, and it’s a big one, truly gargantuan, is to enroll on your birthday as a member of The Registry of Sexual Offense, the truly unique House That Kafka-built bureaucratic institution in American life that isn’t about sex at all and boasts a membership of almost one million (although no one really knows the official tally because its computed with an abacus) and keeps on growing, growing and growing. The Registry is a towering stone fortress of paranoia, digital databases, rotary phones and oppressive marginalization resting atop a granite mountain covered in dirty snow. No one can see the complex or the mountain. There is no road leading to it. Not a single investigative print or television reporter has crept inside for an expose. No mellifluous NPR voices seeking social justice. No Angela Davis fomenting for reform. No Neil Young singing a protest song. Documentary filmmakers would rather document serial murderers. Not a single aspiring writer ever belonging to the Registry has ever escaped, let alone written a published word chronicling his or her membership.

That could change with you. You might really become a writer and publish a book, although Lorrie Moore only mentions writing, not book publishing. Can you become a writer and not publish a book? Ms. Moore needs to write a sequel, but then again, she is famous and has a guaranteed publisher of her books.

Perhaps the word “Kafka” in a previous paragraph threw you off a bit. You don’t know what it means? Is it a person? An architect? A famous ball player who ate a lot of hot dogs and ran around with showgirls?

Kafka was, in fact, a writer of conspiring bureaucratic nightmares, including the expensive, endless, expanding and increasingly privatized American institution called probation, although that would be impossible because Kafka was never on probation for a sex offense in the American criminal justice system and therefore couldn’t possibly have written so accurately about it.

But he did, because he was a magnificent writer, a universal one.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Probation as a sex offender is your golden ticket into the pantheon of literary immortals where fine whiskey, awards and fellowships are served up by admiring supplicants. Your tour de force is dangling right in front you like a man swaying in a gallows with a neon-colored noose around his broken neck. Listen to it creak!

Why, you ask, this golden ticket? Because no writes for publication about probation, particularly as a sex offender. No one. There are no television shows or films about probation (except that sexy one starring George Clooney and J Lo); there are no true crime books about it; there are no thrilling novels of probation with an unforgettable protagonist who demonstrates intelligence, compassion, debonair, eccentricity or a lethal fighting skill. There are, however, shows of dumb bounty hunters and profane repo men.

Probation. Probation. Probation. How could you not write about what you observe in the weekly group meetings? The man who doesn’t exist; the man living under a bridge; the AARP man who rides a skateboard; the man with the boats and cars who lost it all to meth; the man who mends fishing nets; the man carrying around his prescription opiod and pyschotropic medications in pill bottles as his only viable for of identity; the locksmith!

And that was just one meeting! The first bestseller in this nation’s literary history with probation in the narrative mix is practically writing itself! You may even miss when probation is over. But of course, in The Registry, it is never over. Kafka got that right.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)