Advice for Writers in 2024

As is often the case in writing, readers may not like what this writer has to say.

I have nothing to give you if your own writing practice does not come from an intense and roaming place of reconciliation with human pain.

We do it for different reasons. This is one of the more sustainable ones, if you can come to grips with it.

Should this apply to you, I can tell you that a lot of your early work is going to read selfishly and be dissatisfying to you years on.

I can tell you that, atop that, you will get hell for simply having the nerve to say what you are saying.

I can tell you that if you can live through what tatters already remain of your ego being broken as such, you will keep engaging and your work will get staggeringly good, and you will be able to convey a whole ass feelings wheel using twenty-six letters and an electrical outlet. Maybe a pen and pad if the world continues to go to hell in a handbasket.

I can tell you that you will know you are under-recognized.

I can tell you that this misfortune, paired with the isolating, unbecoming ministrations from individuals who mistake you for salvation, will decimate any ego that you have left.

If you live through that, it’s Nirvana from there on out.

You work for you and see what happens. Go where the pain is. Choose another emotion if you tire of this one. You can choose. You will learn to choose. The publishers work for you. The agents work for you. The publicists work for you. The critics were you a decade ago, so you’ve just gotta let them roll with it. Subjects will continue to enchant you.

Finally, I can tell you to never ask for permission to write under the auspices of soliciting advice; those of us in this for these particular reasons know we would still be doing it had the advice been solicited and received — or not. That’s what makes so many of your literary lions so impatient and so unkind. They, in a tragic irony, could not find easy words for the sheer damning reality of the work. The thorn in the paw of it all is, at times, being a fucking human.

No greater life raft absent one than this means of coming into language.

One misfortune at a time.