Words and Whiskey

I’ve lived a very charmed life, choosing to spend most of my time swinging from muse to muse like a monkey in a tree, searching for inspiration. I’ve watched through screens as my friends grew up, chased love, bought mutual funds, and became fathers and mothers to daughters and sons, all while I've been waiting for words.

Words are sneaky little bastards that don’t care about your education or how much time you’ve spent studying them. They don’t care about your degree or the title of your job.

Don’t go to school to be a writer, it’s a waste of your fucking time. Words choose you, not the other way around. In my experience, words worth reading are found at the bottom of a Jameson’s bottle, not in some stuffy, neon-lit classroom where pretentious teachers who never had the balls to become writers themselves recite dead poets and judge your work.

If you want to become a writer, might I suggest becoming anything else – become a vet-tech, go work at the mall, or get a job selling knives door-to-door, but please, I beg of you, do not become a writer.

When you become a writer, you agree to enter a relationship with words, and words are, if nothing else, a jealous lover who will fuck you up.

They’ll have you cleaning your house from top to bottom, and staring at the ceiling while in bed, tossing and turning in knotted sheets. They’ll have you out alone on midnight walks, wondering if they’ll ever show up.

When your words finally do show up and the process begins, don’t write to be loved. Don’t write to be adored or show off how smart you are. Don’t write to be popular, because popular writing is for the masses, and the masses have shitty taste. They’re the dial-tones responsible for making Fifty Shades of Grey what it is today.

Write honest, write raw, write authentic to you.

When you do, something unique will happen. The ones lucky enough to have discovered your work will reach out and tell you that you told their story with your words, and that it’s helped them.

They’ll share your words with co-workers at lunch, and post quotes you’ve written on Instagram, getting more likes on their page than it did on yours. And in the end, that’s all you can ever ask for, because words are sneaky little bastards.