So You Want To Be A Writer by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski has a way with words blunt but profound and this among many of his works is befitting for someone who writes albeit with a keyboard!

If it doesn’t come bursting out of you,

in spite of everthing,

don’t do it.

Unless it comes unmasked 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 are 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 it,

don’t do it.

If you are trying to write like someone else,

forget about it.

If you have to wait for it to come 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’s 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.

A video that I remember that I really like about Bukowski was his awareness of being in the present and his Crappy Life.