ON WRITING |

ON EMAILS
I hate it when people send you a request via email and tack ‘Thanks!’ to the end of it like you’ve already done it. That’s so presumptuous. You know what? No, I’m not going to do it and you can go fuck yourself.

ON CRITICISM ON YOUR WRITING
Don’t take criticism personally. Take people’s perspectives into consideration and if there is something wrong with your writing then fix it. You’re not a perfect writer right off the bat. Nobody is. In fact, the whole point of writing is to get better at it so when looking at your work also evaluate how you have written it. That being said if people have an issue with what you’re writing about that’s not your problem. You start changing your subject matter to appease an audience you might as well put down the pen and pick up a shovel or a gun.

ON CONTINUING TO WRITE WHEN YOU JUST WANT TO FUCKING QUIT
There will be times when you sit at the keyboard wondering why you are bothering. You start to think that what you are doing is a waste of time. It frightens you to put your shit up in public view especially if you write about fucked-up shit like I do with such vigour. It’s like having an incriminating portrait of your soul on display. So here is how you evaluate this scenario: if you have nothing more to say, if you are not enjoying your time writing and would rather be doing something else than go ahead and fucking quit I’m not talking to you. But if you have a lot to say and need to write in order to have some peace of mind, if the stories and words keep coming out like a high-powered faucet and if you want to become proficient at it then you should immediately put that whole idea and feeling out of your head and focus on what you’re going to do next because you are wasting your own damn time otherwise. You want people to like you why don’t you go and post a clip of a dancing squirrel on Facebook. There you go. Feel any better? No? Good. Get to work on your next project then and focus on getting better at what you’re trying to do.

ON WRITING GROUPS
I will no longer attend any kind of writing group because that is the last place you will find anyone that actually writes. What you’ll find instead is a bunch of snivelling pseudo-intellects that have barely produced more than a paragraph over the last five years and yes, it’s always shit. Planning a memoir doesn’t make you a writer anymore than owning a guitar makes you a musician. And why would you want to be a writer anyways? It’s bullshit. Chances are that you would obtain greater personal and financial success becoming an alcoholic mess on a reality TV show. That aside, the next time I want to sit in a room and listen to the inane drivel of incompetent cows I’ll go to the pub down the street where they serve more than social inadequacy, they also serve beer.

ON OBTAINING YOUR GOAL
If you’re going to do something, do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t start it only to drop it a week later that will make you look like an idiot if only to yourself. Don’t put it off because it will remain there. You want to get something done the liability is on you no matter what. It’s not easy. It’s not simple. It’s not going to hand itself over to you. No. You will have to go and fucking get it. You may fail. You may fall, maybe a few times. You may find yourself shitting out your self-esteem because of it. But if you keep at it eventually you will become better, become faster and through that enjoy doing it a little more each day. Overall, you realize that nothing good comes without a lot of work. So if I were you I would get to it because there will always be somebody else that’s working towards the exact same thing at the exact same time. So take action, if it’s wrong you can apologize later and rework it because we’re always going to fuck it up at first. That is how we learn. The whole point of it, of everything, is to be better than yourself.

In the end what truly separates success from failure is what we are willing to do to obtain our goals.