Rasmenia

“They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.” –Lillian Hellman

Know when to tune out, if you listen to too much advice you may wind up making other peoples mistakes.  –Ann Landers

“I always advise people never to give advice.” –P.G. Wodehouse

*

I have a lot of pet peeves. Probably more than a reasonable amount. It’s a rare thing when I can watch TV, leave the house, or hop on the Internet without bitching, mocking, making fun of or simply pointing out something that I find annoying or idiotic. (Unless you’re reading this blog for the very first time, you already know this.)

Often, what I have to do is, I have to stop paying attention to whatever it is that bugs the shit out of me. I must ignore it completely. This isn’t always possible. Try ignoring the human race. It’s tough. Betcha can’t do it for very long. (I’ve tried. People start calling & coming to your house in a panic because they think you’re dead. It’s more irritating than just tolerating them.)

What I have to do then to maintain my serenity levels is, I have to filter out the bullshit to the best of my ability. I’m sure everyone does this to some extent. For me, this is especially true with the Internet because as we all know, the Internet is a never ending flood of bullshit.

However, I’ve been spending more time offline lately. Not having an Internet connection for 6 months sort of weaned me from the world wide teat. I check my mail, I make a few snide comments on Facebook or Twitter, like or retweet some shit, then I go about my day. Every now & then, I’ll get some free time & will spend it surfing around or reading a few articles online. Because I’m connected to several writerly type people & websites, I encounter a shit-ton of writer noise. Some of it is very good, very helpful & very interesting. Some of it is just utter crap.

Especially all of the fucking writing advice.

Advice is helpful. If I do not know how to do a thing, I’ll ask a more experienced person – or someone with a different skill set than I possess – how I should go about doing that thing. I will solicit them for advice. If I want to make my writing better — which I always want to do — I will seek out ways to do this.

So far, the ways I have found to do this are by writing… then writing some more & showing it to the members of my writing workshop. (A writing group works for me. It does not work for everyone. That’s okay.) Then I read books… followed by reading more books, then by writing more stuff.

I will seek out advice in one form or another. When I read a book that just blows the top of my fucking head off with its literary awesomeness, I’ll go out of my way to learn more about the author & their writing process.

I’ll read the occasional book, essay or article on craft. I almost always learn something new by reading these. The only catch is: all of this “advice” should come from a writer who has some serious writing chops. A super word-wrangling champ. If this “advice” is coming from someone other than an author I’ve already read & am familiar with, I want to see the proof in their pudding. Their writing advice essay (or blog post or whatever) should be written well enough to reflect that they know what they’re talking about. I don’t want to read some shit parroting some over-used bits of writer wisdom that we’ve all seen hundreds of times. I want to know what they’ve written. I want to know where their work has been published, whether it’s an essay or short story, or a novel.

Otherwise, I’m outta there. I’ll leave their blog or website, never to return again.

There I go. Down the dark, dusty halls of the Internet.

There is a lot of really bad writing advice out there. There’s a lot of advice that tells you that you can’t. Such as, “you can’t edit as you write”. Bullshit. You can if it works for you. Why not?  Some advice tells you that you must. As in, “you must use an outline”. Please. Good books get written with & without outlines. Stuff your can’ts & musts. These are never good, in any situation. Especially anything that tells you that you can’t. Fuck can’t.

I want more than a blog from someone who just decided to open up a Blogger account & call themselves a writer. I want to see some kind of writer cred. It does not have to be great big massive bestseller writer cred. It can be a wee small mostly unknown indie cred. But for fuck’s sake – it’s gotta be something other than the tired old clichés on writing barfed out on a blog post by an “aspiring writer” who wants to talk about writing more than they want to actually write.

Show, don’t tell. Classic writer’s advice. (How’s that for parroting some shit?) Show me, don’t tell me that you’re a writer. Show me how you’re applying your own advice into your own writing. Advise me by example.

It’s not only the bad, over-used advice from “aspiring writers” with blogs who like to talk about writing & being a writer. Although, yes, I do often find talk about being a writer & “the writer’s life” to just be some boring, romanticized shit.

There is also the fact that one person’s ridiculous & useless piece of writing advice is another person’s magical wand of genius inspiration. It works for one person & for another, it does not & may be scoffed at or made fun of. That’s just the way it is. Not everyone has the same writing philosophy.

What I’ve found is that most writing advice is useless.

What I’ve found is, the more you actually write, the more you can filter the useless dung from the genuine gems of word wizards.

What I’ve found is, it’s better to write than it is to talk about writing & that the teaching should be left to the teachers.

But, you shouldn’t take my word for it. I’m just another writer with a blog… & a lot of pet peeves.

All right, then… it’s been almost 6 months since we moved into this house & lost the luxury of a home Internet connection. Now we finally have it again & I can actually refer to an Internet connection at home as a luxury, rather than a necessity.

Ok… maybe I really don’t believe that. I NEED the Internet. I absolutely need an endless supply of baby animal videos & 10 different columns of nonstop gibberish on Twitter. I require endless stream of commentary on current events to keep me up-to-date & a steady torrent of jingoist YouTube videos on my Facebook news feed to remind me to be patriotic. I MUST have IMDB handy every time I’m watching a movie & can’t remember where I’ve seen that actor’s face before. I fucking NEED Wikipedia to be there every time I have the slightest question about every trivial event or mysterious fruit I happen upon in the produce section.

I can't get on with my life until I've used Wiki to unlock the mysteries of the fingered citron.

These things are IMPORTANT.

Well, until you go for several months without them.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do have a need for the Internet… I’ve been in France for almost 6 years & while it feels like home, I still have another home on another continent. I miss friends & relatives who I communicate with regularly online. I have to be online to blog, to work with my writing workshop via email & to work with online literary magazines so I can add to my ever-growing pile of rejections.

I do have a legitimate need, but after 6 months of disconnection, I have a better view of how much of the Internet is a fucking waste of time. I can look back at how unhealthy information overload really is. Yeah, the ‘net is a tool, but it’s also a luxury & a bunch of bullshit.

So… what did I do with all of that free time?

Books. I read books. Well, I read books before… but I started knocking down my “to-read” pile a little faster than normal while also re-reading a few non-fiction books just to get my nerd on.

I got a sewing machine. No, I didn’t know how to sew or anything & at first, I realized that I couldn’t YouTube any instructional videos, so I had to employ a primitive method of reading the instruction manual from beginning to end, then just figuring the rest out for myself. Get this: it worked. No, no… seriously. It did. I put things in it, sewed them together & made new things. I shit you not.

The Wire. I finally got around to watching all 5 seasons. To be honest, by the time I finished the first season, the strange twitch I had developed as a result of Internet withdrawal subsided. You know why? Omar Fucking Little, that’s why.

Making better use of your time than just about anything else since 2002.

I worked in the garden. I picked cherries from our cherry tree in the summer & raked up the leaves from underneath it in the fall. I put my cat on her leash & sat in my backyard eating strawberries from our garden while doing nothing except for watching the birds & listening to the wind in the trees. What I’m saying is… I went outside. For no reason other than to be outside.

Ok… so it felt strange, but I did it.

I cleaned the house a lot more than I normally would. I polished all of the brass. I bought some old objects from nearby brocantes (kind of like a flea market) & cleaned them up. I baked bread & a cake… just for the hell of it. (This is relevant because I’m not one for baking. Cooking, yes. Baking, no.)

Even though we only had 6 channels until about a month ago, I decided to give French TV a try since I never really watch it & it’s a good way to hone a second language. While I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of shitty courtroom TV & talk shows, I was disappointed to see how much French daytime TV is really just lame American TV dubbed in French. Trust me, those trite Lifetime movies & TV shows from the 70′s don’t get any better with French dubbing. Then again… they can’t really get worse, either.

Yep. Still corny.

Oh, yeah… & I wrote some stuff. But, something strange happened there. My internal motor that normally produces flash fiction began to sputter & lag. Each time I sat down with pen & paper to write a small piece of flash, I ended up with 5 or 6 pages. Is this what happens to people who live offline all the time? Are their attention spans longer? Are they actually able to focus on a single task for more than 90 seconds ALL THE TIME?

After all of this – & more that I haven’t even bothered to mention – I realized that a part of me sort of liked not having the Internet.

After a few months, I dusted off my unused cell phone & handed it over to my husband, who in return handed me a smartphone. With our phones, we had a minimum… a very slow, very weak 3G connection. Just enough to keep in touch with people online & to occasionally refer to Wikipedia in an effort to win an argument.

Occasionally, I would think to myself, “Damn… this real-life, going outside & spending time more constructively thing is incredible. Who needs the Internet?”

Well… I do, for one. The problem with the Internet, is once you have that much information & convenience at your fingertips, you can’t go back. Not really. If you had bothered to read Flowers for Algernon instead of posting your planking pics on Facebook, you would have already learned this lesson. (Another upside of being offline: I just learned about the planking fad a few days ago.)

But, now… we’re connected. My ass is once again parked in front of my 15″ monitor. I’ve got a high speed connection, several tabs & applications open & a super fast WiFi connection all through the house. Now, we’ll see if my expanded attention span will stick, or if like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, I regress back to my previous state.

Fuck it. It’s too much to think about. I’m going outside.

If you have a little girl, don’t let her grow up to be a writer. You’ll only regret it.

Here’s what could happen: you could end up with a weirdo. A weirdo who sits alone in her room, scribbling in notebooks. A weirdo who you wish would try a little harder to be “normal”. But instead, you’ve got this strange little shit, sitting in her room, organizing these stacks of notebooks as if they actually meant something.

When her birthday rolls around, or Christmas, you hope that she’ll ask for one of those cute little fluffy whatever-the-hell those things are called because that’s what your friend’s daughter wants & they’re the same age, so… you hope. But, no. Your little freak asks for a typewriter.

Never mind that she doesn’t even know how to type. Whatever. You’ll buy her the damn thing and try not to stare at the awkward, hand-flying, key-banging style that she’s developing as she’s teaching herself to type.

Then you’ll notice she stopped reading those Choose Your Own Adventure books & started swiping your Stephen King books.

Appropriate reading for a 10 year-old? Yes. Yes it is.

You’ll wait for the phase to pass & as you wait, your weirdo is still collecting stacks of notebooks. She just sits on the corner of the couch, brooding & scribbling.

She takes a typing class at school, but continues to type countless pages of who knows what like a baboon having a seizure because it didn’t break her of that awkward style of typing she taught herself. Weirdo.

The worst part is, when she becomes an adult, it won’t stop. No, it only gets worse. She’ll write some more of her bullshit & broadcast it all over the Internet. She’ll write stories & they’ll show up in random places about how you’re a big fat fucking jerk for wanting her to not be such a weirdo & you will absolutely hate everything she writes, especially when there’s profanity or drugs or penises because you taught her better than that.

Why couldn’t she just want one of those cute little fluffy whatever-the-hell those things are called?

What were those things called? Who cares. Normal little girls had them. Yours won’t.

Don’t let your little girl grow up to be a writer. Everything she writes will only be another testament to your failure as a parent.

This could happen to you.

If you think it’ll be okay to get involved with some weirdo woman writer, think again.

Sure, she’ll seem smart enough at first. She’ll probably be pretty entertaining, too. But, trust me… no good can come from this.

It won’t matter how nice you are. It won’t matter how many selfless things you do. After it all falls apart – & it will fall apart – she’ll go from weirdo mode into full-blast, drunken-psycho-wreck mode.

She’ll take fragments of you & weave them into every horrible, despicable, rotten, rodent-faced fictional character that she makes up. She’ll tell everyone how you got so drunk that you licked spilled spaghetti sauce off of the kitchen floor with the dog. Everyone both of you know will find out about the time she caught you picking your nose, flicking it across the room & all of the other disgusting habits you let her see.

They’ll all get to read about all the stupid things you did, that you didn’t mean to do.

They’ll learn about all of the cruel things you said, that you really felt bad about later on.

Whatever you trusted her with, once it’s over, forget it. The weirdo had tucked it away & will use it all as writing fodder for the rest of her life.

But, not all of it. She won’t write anything about the time you showed up with a bottle of her favorite whiskey when she got fired from her job. She won’t mention the time you knocked on her door & surprised her with dinner while wearing a penguin costume.

She won’t say anything positive about you. She won’t write about anything good from your time with her because she’s a total mess who doesn’t find those happy things to be as meaningful. It’s really how bad you made her feel that’s worth remembering & writing about.

And it’s because, well fuck you because you should’ve known better than to get involved with some crazy writer.

If this happens to you, if you decide to ignore my warning, then try not to take it personally. This weirdo, this cannibalistic freak, she’s observing you, feeding off of you & everyone else she comes into contact with because that’s what she’s always done & there’s a stack of notebooks tucked away in her basement that she’s been accumulating for years & years to prove it.

Countless things you did. They're in here... somewhere.

So, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Then again, maybe you’re smart enough to know that being a weirdo isn’t a bad thing.