How To Write

100 blogs. 200 Motels. 300 days since someone out there last had a cigarette. 400 days until they have their next one.

500 reasons not to write.

It was a milestone I didn’t even know was coming until two blogs ago. It’s one that doesn’t seem important. You wrote a bunch of words and hit publish, and you did that 100 times. Big fuckin’ deal.

In 2026, you can just generate those words. In 2026, websites are animated skeletons run by nobody, that exist so other robots can visit them and get their ad revenue up. In 2026, there is a new war. In 2026, I hear more about the McDonalds CEO and his small ass mouth taking an unenthusiastic bite out of a new burger than I do about that war.

I made a joke the other day about the CEO of Wendy’s sticking a Baconator up his ass to try and demonstrate his superior sense of loyalty to their product. Today, him and every other CEO of every other burger company are practically making love to their shitty burgers with their mouths on social media to prove…something.

I don’t know. I’m just a passenger, man.

The problem is not that the world is not what I thought it would be. The problem is that it’s nothing I really wanted it to be. It just kept being there for thirty years while I ignored it and stuck my nose in front of that first piece of lined paper, that first electric typewriter, that first IBM laptop, so long ago that the memory of that is comprised of hazy little clips in technicolor, where everything is out of scale, where a smell or a sound or the way a clock on a microwave flickered are more clear to me than any word I would have written. It’s all gone, and it was all shit anyways; I was like six years old, how could it have been anything else?

I only remember that at some point, it happened. I decided I liked engaging in this act that was physically painful when I first started. When my little 6 year old ADHD/autistic/whatever-the-fuck brain couldn’t communicate properly with my arm, and so it was painful just to hold a pen. And anything I did write with it could only be read by me. And my parents tried, so hard to help. They would make me sit there and slowly, agonizingly, write out each letter. And even in slow, painful, methodical form, the best I could do was pathetic even by a child’s standard. I had therapy for it. But I just never figured it out, and even at 40, whenever I put pen to paper, I grip the goddamn thing so hard it leaves indents in my flesh, purplish red, that take awhile to go away.

And it still hurts. And I still am not consistent in whether or not I write numbers as numbers or numbers as words. Is it sixty or 60? I’m sure there is a rule, but I never learned it. Because I didn’t care. I still don’t care.

This past week I have been on Substack browsing the feed, and seeing the usual platitudes, anecdotes, and advice about writing. It feels so alienating.

No, I don’t know what it’s like to “both love and hate your own work”. I don’t feel either of those things anymore toward my writing.

No, I don’t know what it’s like to have “writers block”. If I get stuck, I throw it away and do something else. Because if it’s so forced I have to stop and figure it out, it isn’t worth carrying on. Torch it. Burn it. Piss on the ashes. Salt the ground and move on, or do none of those things, because they would be giving too much time to something that isn’t important.

No, I don’t know what it’s like to feel the overwhelming satisfaction and gratification of a project finished. You put your mark on it and move on to the next one. And the next. Because what happened five seconds ago is old news. Ancient history. All that remains is what’s next.

I wish I could say it feels isolating, or that I feel alone, or that I yearn for kinship from others doing this craft, but I don’t. When I unzip in front of a urinal, I don’t feel kinship from the guy pissing next to me. I just hope there is a screen in front of both of our faces advertising the new Dodge Ram so that he doesn’t feel the need to spark up a conversation about the weather while he’s got his pud in his hands. I just want to drain my bladder and get the fuck out of there.

I’ve tried to quit, so many times. Like a bad drug. The worst one. Like heroine mixed up with fent and cocaine and a heaping spoonful of nicotine. I’ve probably said “I’m done” more in the last year than the collective of writers online have asked “how do I start writing?”

I’ve been asked that question too. How do I do what you do? I’ve had my style copied. I’ve been plagiarized, so badly that a dude got fired and shamed for it. And he never wrote again.

Serves the bastard right. If you are gonna copy someone, at least copy someone who knows the basic rules of grammar and structure. You couldn’t even fail properly. What does that say about him?

What does it say about me?

There was a time when I dreamed of becoming a writer. And then one day, out of the blue, I woke up and had the gut-wrenching, teeth-gnashing, skin-crawling realization that I had already fulfilled it. That I had been one, the whole time. That this is what it was, that this is all it was. That like taking a piss in a urinal, it was just something you didn’t think about. It was something you had to do to relieve yourself of the bullshit bouncing around in your skull. Distracting you from school. Distracting you from friends. From your family. From your wife, who almost left you. From the funerals you should have attended for people you will never see again. From being something you could have been, even if you didn’t really want too.

But it really isn’t that serious, is it?

This isn’t my first 100th. There are hard drives full of 100’s. There are 100’s of things I have written that are lost. Just like those memories of being five or 6 or seven or 8 and writing stories about kiwi birds just because I thought they were cute. Things I have forgotten, things I barely remember, things that are scattered on errant hard disks, or on old, decommissioned computers, or scattered sheets of paper in tattered Five Star binders. Things that are on defunct pages whose domain names were lost to a missed payment. Things I only shared with people I don’t talk to anymore, or who are dead, or who I thought I knew, but who is in jail now for child abuse, or that I gave to teachers who never gave them back, never read them, just stamped an A on them because like some little asshole, I made them too big to be read in the 12 seconds they had to review my work among 35 other little assholes who didn’t even bother to fill out half a page of lined paper.

If you meet Buddha on the road, you are supposed to kill him. I don’t know why, but it seems like good advice because it was said with some authority. Because somebody wrote it. If I ever met my old self on the road, and he wanted to remind me of the old dreck I had written, I’d probably want to kill him. Because it doesn’t matter. It’s ancient history.

It’s like the creative writing class I was in, hot off the Lord of the Rings films, where everyone wanted to write fantasy. They were so excited to share their work, and all I wanted to do was hit on the girl with big tits that sat next to me. Where I was so stunted emotionally that I refused to write poetry because I didn’t want to express any genuine feelings, so I stitched some shitty song lyrics together and got a bad grade. Rightfully so. It’s not plagiarism if you are doing it satirically. But it is a real dickhead move regardless.

Why do I even write if I hate it this much? And do I hate it? Do I love it?

It’s a kind of sacred ambivalence. Some pact I made with some inner self that says “it doesn’t matter.” It’s not about love, or hate, or passion, or apathy anymore. It’s not something I do for myself. It’s not something I do for anyone else. I don’t care if it’s “good” or “bad”. I don’t even think about that. I do it because it must be done.

Because it must be done.

I don’t know why it must. The world won’t collapse overnight if I don’t do it. I won’t die, or wither away. I’ll go on existing, and doing other things that also must be done, that must be done far more than me tapping away at a keyboard must be done, but regardless - it must be done, for as long as I can do it, for as long as my brain functions, until I am some drooling invalid rotting away in a hospital bed waiting for someone to get it over with and pull the fucking plug.

But it’s really not that serious. It’s just…or they’re just…words, after all.

But I’m really here to tell you what you want to hear. How do I write? How do I begin writing?

I have an answer.

You probably won’t like it.

You sit down, in front of a piece of paper. Or a screen. Or a rockface. Or a sandpit. Doesn’t matter. And you write.

Even if it hurts.

Even if the wind will come and blow it away.

Even if a bulldozer tears that rockface down.

You just do it.

Because it must be done.

Here’s the kicker.

If you had to ask, you’ve already fucked up.

Because writing is not a thing you choose to do. It’s a thing that happens to you.

It’s a curse. A disease. A blessing. A miracle.

But don’t pray for it to find you, because there is no going back.

It will live on your shoulder forever. Through funerals. And divorces. And births. And wars. And battles for burger supremacy. While you are ogling the tits of the girl sat next to you. When you are sick, and no one can figure out what’s wrong, and you are in your van at 3 AM on the highway trying to figure out a good spot to drive off an overpass because you don’t want to deal with life anymore. When your heart is full of love because you have finally met the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. And when she tells you that it’s over; that she doesn’t want to be with you anymore. And when you have worked on yourself, looked in the mirror for once in your miserable life, and actually tried to change. For her. For the kids you made together.

When you are writing your 100th blog on Substack, and your stomach is turning because you hate that anyone might get a piece of who you really are. Not because they might hate you. Or that they might love you. But for the simple act of knowing. Because then the mystery of who you really are is gone. Because you can’t hide anymore. Because you did what your 8th grade teacher couldn’t get you to do.

You expressed something that was real.

And that’s the secret weapon.

Stop bullshitting.

Stop getting sucked in by writers clique-bait.

Stop reading advice.

Stop reading this, right now, and go write something.

Because it must be done.

You can sort all the other shit out along the way. It isn’t that serious.

This is dedicated to all of my heroes, the people I have looked up to, whose work I have read and absorbed and obsessed over. It’s not worth naming them because all of them are dead. But they know who they are. And with any luck, if they were to read this, they might understand.