Infante's Inferno - As I try to get my day moving...

That I'd never actually feel complete just because I'd written about something.

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Hmm. Yeah, I can relate to that. I sometimes feel satisfaction and relief, but never really complete. And even the satisfaction and relief are fleeting.

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There's never "time to write". You just have to make time.

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Yep. Probably the subject I've written about most in the column, and yet I keep finding things to say.

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Ergonomics will save you severe leg cramps and hand pain. Sounds cheeky, but I never really thought about the health of my hands until pain kept me from the keyboard. I have to get up and walk around, try to get out for a walk when I hit that long pause between the thoughts gushing from my head. Writing is such a sedentary thing, a solitary thing, reminding myself that I need to schedule tea with friends or getting down to the flower shop keeps me from A) becoming the size of a duplex, and B) walking out into the world keeps my mind fresh.

That and decent posture at the keyboard. I suffered physically before I learned these things.

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Oooh, that's a good one. I think I'm definitely going to have to get into that in the column at some point.

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How to hold a pen without getting writer's cramp

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This is some ad hoc shit. Sometimes the best thing uou can do is write every day and push through if you're stuck. Sometimes you should quit pushing and let it come. Sometimes what you need is a good editor; sometimes you need to trust your own voice and not listen to what anybody else says. And there's no way to know, ever, so you gotta just keep making your way, or making, as the title of one writing book states it: "One Continuous Mistake."

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Heh. Oh yeah. I'm reminded of my good friend Amelie Frank, who once said, "If I edit, I will kill it. And if I don't edit, I will kill it."

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Boys who write beautifully are usually the most fucked up in the head.

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::sigh::

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get my real-estate license?
No, although I honestly did consider every kind of Respectable Middle-Class Profession figuring to outgrow this shit.
Didn't work.

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Yep. It's a sort of OCD.

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this is gonna cost you a lot in soda, cigarettes, heartbreak, tears, joy, exasperation and friendship

I would've gone at it a lot harder just to spite them...and then admit they're right, but keep at it anyway

ehhh...I dunno if its a great or bad idea to listen to Joseph Arthur first thing after waking up

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"And I ... I took the road less travelled. And man are my feet sore."

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"Sometimes you have to get ugly." --Rachel McKibbens

"I don't believe in writer's block." --Mike McGee

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Ignore most of the advice you receive. (No, seriously!)

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Yeah, that should be the first lesson when I collect and revise "How To Succeed As A Failing Writer" into a book.

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I wish I'd have had Stephen King's "On Writing" book when I took that year off from work to write.

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That is such a useful book.

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That you'll eventually over-analyze yourself and stop writing, because of writer's block and because you're afraid of repeating yourself or looking like you're stealing from someone else. That you'll lose the muse and wake up feeling like you've failed after that.

I'm still working on getting through/past that one.

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Yep, yep, yep. This has always been my biggest problem: I had a streak of work that I really, really felt did exactly what I wanted it to, and got myself paralyzed with the idea that everything I did had to be at the same standard. Thus, not writing for long stretches.

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Write something that you would want to buy if you saw it on a bookshop shelf, regardless of who'd written it.

Look for good part-time jobs that will give you enough money to live on while leaving you enough time and energy for writing.

And a useful piece of advice for anyone thinking of pursuing it as a career - a little equation that tells you when it's safe to quit your day job. E=mc%, where E = Earnings, m = the minimum number of words you can be sure of writing every day, c = your average payment in cents/word, and % the percentage of your work that you sell. e.g., if you want to make $200/day (E), average 5c/word, and sell 80% of your work, you need to write a minimum of 5000 words/day. (Keep in mind, too, that the markets you sell to may not be able to buy more of your work if you increase your output.)

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I'm so totally using that forumla at some point. With credit of course, but oh yes. That will appear in my column some day.

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That it's OK to sometimes write crap. It doesn't have to be perfect on first or second draft, because it'll never be perfect anyway.

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Heh. Oh yeah. Sometimes you just need to push the crap out of your system.

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Writing will not make you wealthy or more sexually attractive or more interesting to your friends. In fact, you may as well get used to poverty and/or a lifetime of drudge work, and skip straight to the awkward pause after the "So what do you do?" question. If you're feeling unfullfilled, chances are that writing, by itself, will not help you find meaning in your life. (However, it is possible that you may find a voice, and any refinement of the means of expression is worth the struggle.)

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Oddly enough, to first concrete reason I used to decide to start writing was to impress girls.

It didn't work, at least, not when I was 16.

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After a night of editing ... *counts* 1... 2... 3... 4... 5.. 6... 7... 8... major end-of-year essays the night before they're due for students? You want what I wish someone had told me?

1. that it takes six to ten years to make a good writer and there don't seem to be many short-cuts;
2. that the passive voice is pernicious;
3. that at some point you will spend more time editing others than writing your own stuff.

Oh, yeah, and men who write (beautfiully or not) are fucked in the head. Alas.

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As someone who makes their living editing other people's stuff, and then goes home to edit a literary journal and -- in his few spare moments -- is always looking at other people's poetry and essays? You are so right on that last point.

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That the drudgery of the pen is still drudgery.

And the money is less frequent than you need it to be.

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Money? You mean we could get paid for this?

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Drink when you have nothing to write about; write when you have nothing left to drink.

Or more importantly: You can always pay someone else to edit.

And even more important: Find someone who is rich enough to support you in your crazy cracked out habit, bed them, wed them, and then write until you bleed...had I followed this path, I'd be ass deep in novels...and *novel* deep in an Austrailian beauty who liked my writing...*sigh*

Off to write about drinking... ;-)

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Somewhere, in a box in England, there is at least one notebook of alleged poetry I wrote while drunk. If I'm ever famous, someone will make a fortune showing off jus thow really, really bad I was.

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When I stopped writing for ten years, I needed my future self to tell me to keep going. "Keep Going."

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Wow. You're not the only person I know who's stopped for that long, but I've never seen how people could do it. I'd go out of my mind.

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I have a different view, I suppose than the rest. I've written since I first started reading, and won some weird awards and stuff when I was 8 & 9 and had to go to other schools to read my stories.

I wish, that at this time, someone would of told me that writing was a viable option in life, though a hard one. Or maybe at least that writing was something that may not be a career, but that could keep me sane. Instead, I was told that writing was a waste of time over and over, by 14 I had abandoned writing anything for public eyes, and really didn't come back to it til I was 25. I think about how those years would've been if I had been steered differently. Of course, I was still writing tormented teen journal stuff, which counts for a good laugh.

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It's funny, the one place I really lucked out was in having a mom who was extremely supportive of my writing. Without that, Lord knows what would have happened.

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Keep a journal.
Relax about rejection. (It's not personal. And if it is personal you can't do anything about it anyway.)
If you plan on getting married, marry someone who believes in you. If you marry someone who doesn't believe in you, you may just start believing them.
Carry a piece of paper and a pen with you always in your back pocket. (Thank you Anne Lamott for that one.)
Spend time in nature.
Read a lot.
Enjoy your work, because you might be the only person who ever does. Savor your wins. Forget your losses.
Have as much sex as possible. (I think that's just good advice for anyone, writers or not.)
Invest in a laser printer if you can afford it.
Be kind and professional. Today's enemy may be tomorrow's editor.
Never, ever quit submitting.
Never, ever quit trying to improve your writing.
Don't be ashamed of what you're compelled to write whatever literary or bastardized genre you think it is. Make peace with it early on and pursue that market with zeal.
Help other writers when you can. Pay it forward.

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All excellent advice, though I could probably get into trouble for suggesting #8 to my students.

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