Let Loose and Lose Customers
You need to break the surface tension on your own writing. If you’re writing the Next Great Novel, the Words Of Fate to be inscribed forever on your own fuckin’ tombstone you will be locked up inside your fear of failure; rigid; tetanus, like the Tin Man with no oil can.
I quite like the creator Neil Cicierega. He did Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, Potter Puppet Pals, and also a lot of surrealist short comedy horror. One of the uploads on his channel is called “Chocolate Sauce”. It’s a basically-motionless, two-second video of a Hershey’s Strawberry syrup bottle, as he says the words “chocolate sauce”.
This is great. This breaks the surface tension. If you take yourself too seriously your writing will not flow beautifully. It will be constipated, self-conscious, writing defensively; trying to make sure that there is literally no line in there that a mean internet critic can screenshot out of context and say “HEY MORON? IS THIS YOU? IS THIS YOUR FUCKING BRAND??”
If you want to write, if you want to Be A Writer, first step is to just punch the fucking keys and don’t stop. This is why writers get drunk!
The brakes, in your head, are there to keep you from embarrassing yourself in social situations. We used to live in tribes of three hundred people and a social gaffe can follow you for your whole life.
But if you get DRUNK and ideally are also RAILING AMPHETAMINES then the words will flow with ease, will gracefully slide out of you like diarrhea. Your inoffensive social voice is the LEAST INTERESTING THING about you.
You should not be leading with the boring storebought parts of yourself that even you don’t respect.
Your TRUE VOICE is UNIQUE and DIFFERENT. Every single person sees things differently and you want to be above their threshold of interest and in the modern world it is hard to do that without being DIVISIVE so you BITE THE BULLET and, as you may have heard, EMBRACE THEIR HATRED.
God, does anybody remember that one dating graph? Where, if you want to date Goth girls, you should dress way more Goth, because although that will alienate 95% of the population, you were only a sort of bland 60% percentile fuckability to them anyway, so in order to actually make your body into a sales funnel, you should dress for the user you want and just bite the bullet that you’re losing almost all people and this is better because you reach the people you want.
Do I want to make a point about how it’s not actually that hard to write 500 words? Maybe, as a treat, one of the days I will write thirty times five hundred words; do the entire Inkhaven in a day. How hard could it be? Wildbow does it all the time.
Heh. And yet I spaced out “30” as “thirty” because I didn’t want the word processor to miss giving me a point for that one word. Old college habits, y’know? The specification-gaming runs deep.
Oh my god I got distracted. People texted me. The classic human siren’s calls of FUCKABILITY and STATUS are calling me. Time to go text people back, after an appropriate cool-kid delay.
This is why Rotten Tomatoes is so worthless. I don’t care about the percent of people who thought the movie was OK. Give me more of “The Fountain,” movies that change 10% of lives that 60% of people hate.