So you want to be a writer

Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Autographed copy

he books I buy often are autographed copies, not on purpose do I choose these, I am mainly looking for titles. With that said, writers tend to get autographed copies, it is like the super book gift. The author with a stack of a hundred or more sat there and signed his or her name over and over.

Somehow having someones name on their own book is better. I don't believe that. How well read the words are, how they pounce on you, stay with you, when you recommend the book to someone else, that is better then a autograph.

I have one autographed book I took with me while my house burned. Once my kids and animals were out, the book I got smoke in my lungs for is a Kurt Vonnegut book. "Cats Cradle" - I trace the letters of his name, hastily scrawled. Perhaps thinking along the same lines 'Why do they want my name? Read the book that is the treat!'

In my day which is now, 2010, I am more then halfway done with a book of stories. Maybe once you have one done then the rest follow in quicker sequence. Birth isn't like that. Love isn't like that.

Books are somewhere else. Their own galaxy. This writing.com site tells me I haven't logged in, in 8 months. I always subscribed that writing was a solitary pursuit. That self aggrandizing and editing others works were somehow a selfish endeavor. It keeps the writer from the primary excuse for living, which is to experience and to write.