Ye be Cowards, Ye Penman of Sordid Writ

Let there be fury. You bastards, there’s too much bad writing going on. Half-baked ideas and notes churned out daily to no avail. Cries for attention thrown into the howling winds, voices silenced by your own cacophony. Why write at all if you have nothing to say? The inkwell has run dry and yet you persist in scampering words together to build your tepid and impotent tales that lead nowhere. They leave the reader with nothing to consider, nothing to carry forth with. Most reveal their learning and the lack thereof expediently, within the first paragraph even, if not the first sentence. Too many fools who read what they understand and mistaking understanding for being informed and clever. It shows in the writing. No depth, no wrestling with your own beliefs. A viewpoint is important, but it serves no purpose if it is solely there to confirm your biases. Writing is an opportunity to explore, to venture into the wilds, to entertain ideas and personalities that we would not suffer for one second in real life. Whether it’s Roth or Bukowski, O’Connor or Dostoevsky, let them lead you to the precipice and stare into the abyss. But you won’t do that, will you? There’s too much risk in that, to discover what is dark in all that light you blind yourself in. Jot down some ideas, write shallow little accounts of fluff entertainment. Cotton-candy stories and ideas rot the mind, and there’s plenty of that writing going on. Writing penned by cavity filled imaginations. There’s no setting aside of the self and letting characters be themselves. Everything just feels like the same Mary Sue over and over again. I want to see the Christian who wrestles with God, the atheist who struggles with faith, the murderer developing a begrudging respect for life. I want to see a working through, a wrenching of the creative spirit, a retching of all that we are. No, none of that. Risk nothing, lose nothing, and it’s best to have someone to point the finger at. Or a flag to write under. A writer’s cause is to undermine their own hierarchies. The only loyalty is to the work, and wherever that’ll take you. Cowards, the lot of you. Attention-seeking, tit-grabbing, sycophantic drivel mongers. Writing fiction is furnishing a lie with truth, but the disrespect shown to the latter is staggering. What do you have to say? Even if its just fluff pieces and you’re doing this to entertain others, its best to do it well and in earnest. Fail if you must but make a sincere and honest attempt at the truth, even if what is revealed to you is unpleasant and goes against your very beliefs. For in this ocean of souls you are but one and there are millions unlike and yet similar to you. What you can glean, so can they. What you struggle with, so do they. When the Nazarene was nailed to two pieces of wood, he knew that his deity valued the sacrifice of the individual more than the sacrifice of a thousand. Be a Christ, a Buddha, a Muhammed, carry that burden forward and despite the fear the sacrifice entails, get up on that proverbial cross and bring something better into this world. For none of it matters and yet all of it does. Impermanence rules existence, and there’s no harsher truth than what once flourished will fall, and for that reason and that reason alone, what we do matters and should not be taken lightly for this is all that we have. Seek challenges and try to grasp things far out of your reach. Have the courage to know, to empathize. There’s too much writing going on that goes nowhere, of people who are too comfortable with what they know and don’t want it challenged. Words are for play, they are a profane joy, a broken hallelujah, but you don’t see yourself reflected in how you write, how you speak, or in others at all either. Cowards. We all contribute our share of bad writing to the world, without that we cannot learn, but learn we must, and there’s plenty of writers who refuse to learn. An accomplishment is only as good as the path it sets you on. A finished story needs to be reacted against. It’s a landmark on a map, and there’s a lot of wildernesses to explore. Keep moving, ye bastards. Keep searching, so that when you get to Anubis your heart will be worth its weight in gold and remain as light as a feather. Writing draws out what we have in common by way of emphasizing what is unique in an individual’s experience. As Joyce said, in the particular you can find the universal, and in the universal the particular. But there are too many who do not take into consideration why they write. They vomit onto a page what bits of hackneyed alphabet soup they can bring up and don’t even consider whether they are contributing to the failures of human existence. This tirade is coming to an end. I’ve let the anger that I had kept down up to this point come forth. Draw the ire that it must. Bad writing be damned.