Stop trying.

“We work too hard. Try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. Looking right at us. Aching to kick out of the closed womb. “

- Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski was an American writer born in 1920. His style and prose, raw, aggressive, dirty, and vulgar, became a trademark in the 1960s Upbeat generation. His novels and short stories narrated what we don’t want to hear, but are there every day, in front of us. The suffering, loneliness, alienation, renegades, drug addicts, alcoholics, sex, and all other facets of life that we try to suppress or ignore. He gave a voice to these people and made them shine. Plenty of self-irony, displaying all his defects without shame, no sugar coating, and no happy endings.

Bukowski wrote for more than 30 years without success. He was rejected by publishers countless times. Until John Martin from Black Sparrow Press read him and thought he found a literary genius. Bukowski published his first novel “Post Office” at 51 years old, after thousands and thousands of poems and short stories.

If you happen to stroll around Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, you might come around his tombstone, with this enigmatic epitaph:

DON’T TRY

It might seem hypocritical, from an individual that essentially never gave up. Despite the critics, the rejections, and the scorn from the establishment, Bukowski kept writing, until he died. But what Bukowski meant is something else.

For most of his life, Bukowski was not affiliated with any publication. He was under no obligation to publish a certain amount of material within a set period of time. He had no contract, no constrictions, in other words, he wrote whenever he wanted to, whenever he felt like doing it.

This is the key.

Any artistic endeavour should not be “forced”, it should come spontaneously. If you are “trying”, something’s wrong. The term “trying” in itself gives us a clue as to the attitude at play. Trying to do something, attempting to do something, implies an effort to do, get, and/or make, which feels like a constriction. You should just do it, not try.

Bukowski argued that we should listen to our impulses, and let the inspiration of the moment take us wherever she wants to take us.

In an interview he once said:

Somebody asked me: “What do you do? How do you write, create?” You don’t, I told them. You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it.”

Considering the current fetishism for productivity, this might not sound appealing to you, but that’s just how it is. Would you have forced Picasso to make a painting? Beethoven to write a symphony? Newton to make a discovery?

Those individuals were not trying, they were not concerned (like today) with labels to attach to themselves. If you are writing because you are trying to be a writer, you will never be one. Find yourself and embrace yourself, be what you are and not what you are trying to be.

Stop trying, just do it.

Like Bukowski said in his poem “So you want to be a writer?”:

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you want women in your bed, don’t do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don’t do it. if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it, don’t do it. if you’re trying to write like somebody else, forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers, don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don’t be dull and boring and pretentious, don’t be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don’t add to that. don’t do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it.

when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

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Giovanni Foglia