Who wants to be a full-time writer?
Fuck Writing For A Living
Don’t do it, you bastards
A wizard with blue eyes appeared to me in a dream. He said our writing energy is like a limited supply of gold coins given to us each day which we should spend wisely
I know what happens. I’ve been there.
You wake up at a casual ten AM.
Your wife or husband or equivalent has nicked off to their 9–5 job, so you seize the opportunity to engage in a long wank over the oldish neighbour with the size 78DDD melons who is sunbathing again in her purple knickers.
Eventually, you ejaculate or equivalent, have your obligatory moment of self-reflection about what a perverted loser you are and whether you should nap for another few hours before you finally crawl off to your writing desk by 12.30.
Ah, the life of a writer, what fucking luxury. What an absolute dream, isn’t it?
You sit there, going blind from staring at a screen, getting slowly fatter, slowly more anti-social, blood pressure rising, the ache in your left leg inflaming from the massive bag of M&Ms you ate the night before.
And, you think, what should I write today?
- Perhaps a fictional article about the misery of being led into World War Three by a geriatric, dementia ridden old gentleman who can’t string a sentence together?
- Perhaps a meta article about how writers should write more about how writers would make more money if they wrote more about serious topics such as articles about the misery of being led into World War Three by— well, you get the point.
You sip on your coffee and self-loathing for a moment and notice all the speeding fines pinned to the two-dollar corkboard/whiteboard combo that you never use. You start having a panic attack.
You breathe in and out of the paper bag from last night’s large quarter pounder meal and the smell of genetically modified canola oil makes you feel calm again.
But you know you have to make some money.
You can’t keep pimping your bleached writing anus on the writer’s version of Hollywood Boulevard, conveniently known as ‘Medium’.
Enter the back alley heroin factory for writers known as Airtasker
You do a couple of copyright jobs or real estate listings, or you ghostwrite a couple of articles which, when Airtasker takes its massive pimp cut, won’t even pay for a meagre head of broccoli to make your ‘broccoli soup’ in line with your latest health delusion.
But things start looking up. Clients like your work and use you for other jobs outside the heroin factory. Soon, you are a high-class literary hooker charging a ton of money to suck off rich bastards and make them richer.
And you think, I’ve fucking made it.
But there is an old English saying,
The shoemaker’s children are shabbily shod.
It means that
- The shoemaker can’t be fucked making shoes for their kids.
- The prostitute cant be fucked fucking their significant other.
- The writer can't be fucked doing their own writing.
You have shat into your own helmet. You’ve made writing into your job, and now you HATE it so much more than you used to.
Three months in, you might stab yourself in the eyeball with a pencil if you have to write one more real estate listing about something being light-drenched or state of the art.
You stare at the crafted articles for which you sweated blood with a sheet over your head for some bastard on Medium who is now bowing in front of their peers for their genius and you want to send them an anonymous letter made up of newspaper clippings that just says FRAUD.
And to top it all off, bastards aren’t paying you. You wait months, you hassle them constantly, and they fucking ignore you, and you realise it’s hard to chase down debts unless you are an established corporation or someone that is willing to walk into an office with a bread knife and say,
‘Okay, Im taking $243.57 worth of testicles and titties today. Who’s first?’
You spend more time at your computer each day in a stationary position, inflaming more, getting more depressed only now, you don’t even have time for your art.
You have chafing on your chafing.
After six months, you can’t take it anymore. The money is alright but money is supposed to give you freedom rather than drive you harder into the pit of despair isn’t it?
One day, you just snap like Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
You tell all of your clients to get fucked, and you get a lousy job in a lousy kitchen washing lousy dishes instead.
And, as if by magic, something amazing happens. You start to feel like yourself again. Your blood pressure comes down and you get an erection for almost a whole minute.
Washing dishes isn’t creative
You have time to think and meditate, and the writing ideas flow faster than a young healthy man pissing at the cubicle next to you.
In this place — in this shit kitchen — there is a chance you might learn something about life — something that you will never learn sitting at your desk.
You realise that wanting to be a full-time writer is a manifestation of laziness that turns your life into a boring shit-heap. But in this strange job, faced with people’s used mouth towels and bits of chewed up gristle you realise that hardship is creative.
It’s good because it’s lousy. And, the lousiness makes you want to write again.
If your art is more important, but you still need to pay the bills, go out and get a job doing something challenging — something that isn’t writing.
- Dig ditches
- Wash dishes
- Work in a call centre.
Find a job that is a bit shit and that will nurture your stories. Meet people. Talk to people. Exercise your speaking and humour muscles. Give yourself a chance to experience something. Allow yourself to learn something about life.
Writers write about things, and sitting at your desk, how many things happen? Sure, you can cherry-pick some article about a cop that put his cock in between two bits of bread for a joke while his wife was making sandwiches when their dog jumped up and bit off his cock. Or sometimes you can make shit like that up. But that creativity is stimulated by life.
We are writers. We have to write about life, and, to write about life, we have to live it by getting away from our chafing stations.
Give up your dream to be a full-time writer cos writing for someone else sucks big time.
Just promise yourself that you will never pimp out your writing anus again.
