New Writers, Writing Advice From Charles Bukowski That May Kill You
You’re bold to follow this piece of advice
I thought of Charles Bukowski at 2 a.m.
Most people are asleep, but I googled “Charles Bukowski quotes” and found fifteen to twenty links to Charles Bukowski’s quotes on love, life, and writing.
Bukowski was known in his poetry for his plain, direct writing style and brash attitude. He is a master of writing things masses of people experience, but are afraid to confront in life like the drudgery of going to a 9 to 5 job every day.
Don’t read Bukowski if you don’t like to look in the mirror.
He was a champion of the struggler, the person at the bottom of the heap who wasn’t sure if they could wake up and make it another day, and the honesty in his writing and misanthropic worldview gained him a massive cult following.
His poems are raw, crude at times and sometimes violent. He is the antithesis of the poets you grew up reading in high school like Robert Frost (“Two roads diverged in the woods, and I took the one less traveled by”), and I like the honesty and straightforwardness in Bukowski’s poetry.
Bukowski definitely took the path less-traveled, and I am doing a five-day series on analyzing different quotes (probably mostly on writing) from Bukowski, and I hope you join me into this deep dive into his mind.
Bukowski Quote #1
“Find the thing you love to do and then let it kill you.”
— Charles Bukowski, Last Night of the Earth Poems
The first part of the quote — find what you love — reminds me of another Bukowski quote:
“How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30AM, by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
That’s a harsh truth, and it’s true many people go to a job only because it pays the bills — not out of any great satisfaction in their work.
What’s the solution? Find what you love.
From my experience, doing an activity that you love regenerates your personal energy because you’re doing it out of a love you have for it. And it’s the opposite for the work you don’t love. Even if you’re still working at your job, finding and doing what you love will give you a huge burst of energy.
Then Bukowski springs a shocking statement after the first part of the quote
It appears to contradict what he just said, but it’s a paradox.
Like all paradoxes, it’s a case where two opposite truths can be true.
“Let what you love kill you”
I think he is simply saying to commit your whole being to the thing you love doing to the extent that it leads you down rabbit holes and destroys other interests and beliefs that don’t matter to you as much as that thing you love.
It means to stop watching Netflix every night to read a book to lead you closer to learning the craft of good writing or study a Medium writer you like and try to notice the methods other writers are using to make their stories work.
It means being more passionately obsessive towards your love of writing, getting annoyed when the phone rings or a loved one wants to talk to you. It may also mean the loved one may get upset at you from writing so often.
It means the Comedy Husband will come out of his office (Pam Winter) and interrupt you right in the middle of a marvelous writing rant and you will stop and lose track of your thought and you might politely tell him you’re writing.
So be it.
Final Thought
The good thing is my writing quality decreases after four hours, but I persist like Kobe Bryant, getting up early to write, resting and spending time with my family, writing and resting, and then reading Bukowski quotes around 2 a.m.
That’s what Charles Bukowski is talking about in killing yourself by doing what you love. It means to keep persisting in your writing because you’re unknowingly following the advice of Charles Bukowski to let the thing you love kill you. And it’s not a bad thing. It just a description of what happens when you do the thing you love. You start to kill yourself and it’s all good.
That’s how I see Charles Bukowski’s quote and, personally, I’d rather be killed doing what I love than my life being spent doing what isn’t my main love.
Here’s a little sampler of Bukowski:
Go all the way — Charles Bukowski
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
You might also like:
Or check out my YouTube video on tips for writing on Medium. Suggest a topic and I will make a video on that topic.
If you are not a Medium member and would like to receive unlimited access to all Medium content, you can sign up here. It’s just $5 a month. I will receive a small referral bonus, at no additional cost to you, when you sign up using my link.