Manifesto.

James Bezerra’s

Writing Manifesto

Calm down,

no one cares about your masterpiece until you’ve written it. (1)

If you have a story to tell,

determine the form which is most advantageous for that story. (2)

Read everything ever written in that form;

learn to breathe that form. (3)

Now write

until it is written. (4)

If you have no story to tell,

stop wasting everyone’s time. (5)

Despite themselves,

all people enjoy the occasional use of the word ‘fuck’, (6)

learn to use it sparingly and effectively.

Also, do this with all the other words too. (7)

If ever in doubt,

sexy is always better than not. (8)

Always know more than your reader

and always tell them you know more than them. (9)

Understand that love and fear are basically the same thing, and

that fundamentally those are the only things. (10)

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(1)

Most of the writers you meet don’t write. Not really. Most of the writers you meet are low-rent philosophers, aspirational authors, deeply hopeful searchers, or lying. This explains the growing prevalence of theory-fictions, of writers writing novels about writers writing novels, of the reduction of the Humanities to relativistic pseudo-sciences. Having an idea is not the same as successfully birthing that idea into a piece of writing. The idea is not the thing. Writers, to be writers, have to make the thing.

(2)

If you are packing for a ‘round-the-world cruise and you would like to take your pet dolphin with you, it would be wise to have a vaguely dolphin-shaped suitcase in which to put him. A smaller suitcase is no good because it isn’t big enough to hold him. A too-large suitcase is no good either; how would you move it? Consider the weight of the water in addition to the weight of the dolphin. Once on the cruise ship, you can put the dolphin in the wave pool, so all you need is a tool to get the job done. This is not a decision that is ideological. It is a practical decision. As a responsible dolphin-owner, you should be familiar with many different types and kinds and shapes of dolphin-transportation-suitcases, so that you can choose the best one for any of your dolphin transport needs. This is also true of the form and structure of a piece of writing.

(3)

There are many things I like about running, chief among them is the fact it is simple. Own good shoes and possess the will to go out and run. That’s about all there is to it. One need not study Usain Bolt to improve as a runner; because none of us will ever be Usain Bolt. This philosophy does not, however, hold true of the structural engineers who build bridges. We ask those engineers to know everything there is to know about bridges. We ask that they have studied bridges: big bridges, little bridges, bridges made of steel and bridges made of stone, good bridges and failed bridges. We ask our bridge builders to know more about bridges than we do. We ask a lot of them. While there are some other similarities between writing and running, in this regard, writers are engineers.

(4)

There is no easy way to break this to you: the only way to write a book is to write it. It will involve many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many hours of your life spent sitting still and hallucinating into a keyboard and likely no one will ever even notice or care. You may spend years of your life writing it and a quick reader will read it in a day, shrug, and go microwave a pizza. No writer, no matter how profound, will ever stop the Earth from turning. Despite these things, there is no other way to write.

(5)

Writers descent from shaman and fireside story tellers. The written word is an extension of the spoken one. Storytellers serve a social function; we have a job, a duty, an obligation. Writing - good writing - is not only self expression, it does something. It is something, if it isn’t then it's nothing.

(6)

Believe it or not, not everyone says the word “fuck”. My grandmother abhorred it. But she did like George Carlin and sometimes he said it. Be it naughty, or offensive, or even a little mean, we all sometimes like to have our boundaries pushed. Also, “fuck” is a versatile word.

(7)

If you ever get the chance to stand very close to a Jackson Pollock painting - so close that it makes the security guard in the gallery a little nervous - you will begin to notice that it is not quite as much of a mess as it initially seemed. There is control in it, there is even order to the composition, though it is a Big Bang kind of exploding order like the explosion one can get by shaping a plastic explosive before detonating it. The energy that created a Pollock painting is controlled, effective, and even - when you really look at it - sparing. Write like that.

(8)

“Sexy” is a transmutable word. There can be sexy in the grotesque, in the violent, in the well-crafted sentence, in a good line of description, in a well-rendered tragedy. Sexy is that which makes a thing attractive to us. Often that attraction lurks somewhere below what we say or do or understand. There is an animal instinct within us that determines what is sexy and the writer must try to access that.

(9)

The reader has to make an investment of time (and therefore of a quantity of their own life) in you, the writer. It is your job to be good enough not to waste their time (and therefore their life). The reader likes to know that you are not going to screw them over on their investment. The reader likes to be able to believe in you. The reader wants to believe in you. The reader should be able to read you and stand confident in you. Your writing should allow the reader to believe in you.

(10)

When boiled down to their essential elements, most emotions are only either love or fear. Though somewhat different, these both can strain the knotted muscle of our heart. Both make us sweat and dilate our pupils. Nearly all things can be reduced to either love or fear and the writer must know that and must be able to control those things and use that knowledge as a tool. Manipulative as it may be, it is only this way that the writer can cross the gulf and reach out to the reader.

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