I’m currently taking a writing, blogging, and coaching sabbatical due to family health issues. For now, I’ll repost selected articles from my Fiction Writing School. I encourage you to take the time to read these powerful, awe-inspiring words.
Here is the link to today’s article. It’s taken from Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers.
“Writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
The latest addition to this ongoing omnibus of famous writers’ advice on the craft comes from none other than Charles Bukowski — curious creature of proud cynicism and self-conscious sensitivity, of profound pessimism and heartening insight on the meaning of life.
In Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963–1993 (public library) — the same indispensable gateway to the poet’s mind that gave us the first-hand backstory on his “friendly advice to a lot of young men” — Buk extols the intrinsic rewards of writing. Years before he would come to explore the subject in his famous poem “so you want to be a writer,” he echoes Borges’s sentiment that writing is a form of pleasant laziness and Bradbury’s insistence that one must create with joy or not create at all. The message, of course, is delivered with Buk’s signature blend of crudeness and sincerity:
Writing isn’t work at all… And when people tell me how painful it is to write I don t understand it because it’s just like rolling down the mountain you know. It’s freeing. It’s enjoyable. It’s a gift and you get paid for what you want to do.
I write because it comes out — and then to get paid for it afterwards? I told somebody, at some time, that writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money. I’ll take it.
When pressed about his daily routine, Buk scoffs and adds to the peculiar rituals of famous writers:
I never type in the morning. I don’t get up in the morning. I drink at night. I try to stay in bed until twelve o’clock, that’s noon. Usually, if I have to get up earlier, I don’t feel good all day. I look, if it says twelve, then I get up and my day begins. I eat something, and then I usually run right up to the race track after I wake up. I bet the horses, then I come back and Linda cooks something and we talk awhile, we eat, and we have a few drinks, and then I go upstairs with a couple of bottles and I type — starting around nine-thirty and going until one-thirty, to, two-thirty at night. And that’s it.
Complement Sunlight Here I Am, which exudes Buk’s inextinguishable spirit from every page, with more notable wisdom on the written word, including Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, Walter Benjamin’s thirteen doctrines, H. P. Lovecraft’s advice to aspiring writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to his daughter, Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 keys to the power of the written word, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, Neil Gaiman’s 8 rules, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.
The Pencil Driven Life 