Larceny of Letters: Prologue
Only a certifiably disturbed person would seek to practice the writers craft. Essential wiring would have to be missing-in-action from the part of their brain that processes rational decisions related to making a living.
A person choosing writing as their vocation would have to be endowed with an obvious deficiency of basic survival instincts as well as anything resembling sound judgment. Sound like you? If so, go ahead and order in a few army cots.
Anyone opting to be a writer while there ís still time to get into the wholesale leisure suit industry would have to be a victim of serious emotional abuse, at home or, abroad, a very crazy broad, at that. The damage may have emanated from either of the parents or, perhaps, from a consortium of older siblings, each bearing his or her serious psychological baggage.
Whatever imbalance in basic genetic manufacturing causes the disorder, the results are invariably the same. Someone usually gets hurt, really badly, usually the writer, itself.
Anyone choosing to be a writer would have to enjoy paddling upstream into the waterfalls of life with a bad headache, while strapped into a leaky, heavily mortgaged Chris Craft with perforated oars and a hole in the hull.
Stated inevitably, the individual would have to be daft.
So, please tell me why you or anyone, for that matter, would give literature as a means for existence even a second look. Are you nuts or something?
On any random day, thousands of living humans elect to become writers. Coercion is rarely an issue. People do this voluntarily. Quite clearly, there are fungi among them.
For 99 out of 100 people who write for a living, terms of existence are, at best, abject. And yet, new writers enter the field every day of the week, with an unusual concentration on Fridays. Why do they do this? Did someone put date-rape drugs in their water supply? Can we attribute all of this to hedonism, or is nepotism or patriotism also an issue?
This book goes out of its way to answer those questions. It does so with a dash of style and a partial load of substance, mostly style. If you or anyone you know is on the fence regarding a career in writing, this book will surely push you or your acquaintance either off the fence or further atop it.
One thing is certain: You won't be the same after you've finished reading it. You'll be older.
Reading this book could easily be the most important thing you will ever do, with the possible exception of forming your own personality. It could change your very existence or it could lead you to open far more credit card accounts than Burt Reynolds would deem responsible BEFORE he quit taking elephant tranquilizers.
Discovering the truth between these sordid covers could open up doors you never thought would be there for you out there in Donkey-kong, Utah or wherever in the heck you're spending the winter. This book is deep, so depth oriented, in fact, it has become recommended reading for all conscripts at the West Virginia Academy For Free-lance Squeegees People.
In 33,000 words or more, this study in male hybrid nose tweezing comes with a guarantee -- anyone reading it will need to go to the bathroom, afterwards. Or at least at some point within the following year.
If you are not a writer now and do not seek to be a writer, there is one more unconditional offer we can include, free of charge: no one cares.
Transformation may be right around the next bend. Or, it may be wrong around the next bend. You'll never know until you pish in the cup.
Writing for a living and emotional instability are one-in-the-same. It is pretty ugly, actually. Finding totally squared-away people who are writers is harder than figuring out calculus on the back end of a tequila binge.
Be that as it never could be, grasping this truth accomplishes little in the name of saving souls from near-certain descent. People whose self-contempt is greater than their innate sensibility invariably opt for writing as opposed to more reliable forms of making a living such as land fill management, pest control and cemetery headstone sales.
You may not believe any of this. You may figure writers are society's watch guards, beacons of truth in a world gone to Uganda. Sure they are. And I am ze Easter Bunny, with ze French accent.
You are about to spend a considerable amount of time considering an extremely bold concept, that is, the supposition of writers being crazy folks. This isn't a pleasant thought. How much easier it would be for all of us to suspend judgment and logic and, if only for a moment, dare to imagine the writers among us as normal human beings. Alas, this pristine mythology is entrancing sublime. It is also a fairly massive crock.
Face it, bull fighting aficionados, most writers are off their rockers. Writing, said Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who ought to know, is an instinctive, irrational process. He characterized the period when he wrote most of his novels as being like skiing down a slope.
It is a fact of words. Being emotionally intact and writing for a living are old foes from way back. They don't get along, any better than their ancestors did. We're talking Hatfield's and McCoy's, Irish and English, Palestinian and Israeli, crow and cow, really. They just don't like one another. I don't blame them.
When you've finished reading this work, you may find yourself slightly disoriented or even disintegrated, in a moral or, worse yet, spiritual sense. Don't worry. You will get over it. You'd better. You have a whole career in front of you.
If you plan on becoming a writer, you're going to need all the brain power and intestinal flu you can bluster. If you plan on setting the world on fire with your prose and insight, you're going to need a firm butt and a soft pillow, not to mention a few hundred thousand good ideas.
This book will challenge you to reconsider your career decision. You will learn that getting out of being a writer is easy in the early phases and absolutely impossible after the five-year point. No one has ever come back from being a professional writer, at least not anyone I know, or any immediate family members.
You are about to learn that becoming a writer is the modern-day equivalent of joining the French Foreign Legion, in that once you've joined, you've more or less bought the farm for life. Or, at least, secured a decent land contract on the property to the point where you are technically liable for damages.
Writing is not for everyone. In fact, most are well advised to find other work. If you must write, you must read this first. Not because its author has a whole lot of original thought to visit on the subject -- I don't. What I do have is a perfect willingness to borrow from the best, so to speak.
That is what I have done here, Aunt Bee and Uncle Elvis. I swiped everything I could get my keyboard on, from cherished files on the subject of writing as well as my own vast reservoir of experience, including how I stubbed my toe taking out the trash last night.
In this book are the cumulative thoughts of thousands of experts on the subject, from Dave Barry to Barry Dave. I urge you to read on, to learn from them and to perform the final reality check on your pending career choice.
When you're done, you'll be ready. And, once you're ready, you'll be done. That is called irony, folks. You'd better like irony because that is all there really is in this craziest of all sports. Agony and irony.
The odds may be against you but I wouldn't let that stop you. If writing is in your blood, you don't have any choice. You're a daft individual, on the verge of an unconventional existence. Less power to you! And, never forget: transfusions are available.
