There Are No Rules

When we’re finished, I’m going to show you a picture of my dogs.

Do you expect to become rich as a result of your writing? Stop. There’s no money left for you, it’s all been spent. Not being particularly business-minded, I’m amazed by the negligible amount of cash I have acquired through writing, but I’m certain there is no more coming.

Thank god, because writing specifically to get paid was tedious and fucking boring.

Swearing in articles makes me feel like a badass, you know, like The Undertaker.

Now that all the money is gone, I can write weird shit. I can provoke thoughts and emotions, negative or positive, rather than pandering to an audience for a personal finance blog. No longer motivated by money or fame, I can now focus on actually being successful, rather than validated. You do know success and validation are different, right?

If validation is your definition of success, that’s damned unhealthy, but I still like you, and you can still see my dogs.

Let me go ahead and ruin the suspense, when writing for an audience, if you follow current trends, recommended tagging methods, pander, and are a half-decent writer, you’re going to get some traffic. It may take a few tries, but you’ll receive thousands and thousands of virtual pats on the back sooner or later.

Again, that’s not success, that’s validation.

Congrats, you’ve followed instructions on blogging methods and can communicate via the printed word, and lots of people know it! Tell your Facebook friends.

More spoilers: your friends don’t care about any of your creative endeavors. Neither do these people.

A monkey could achieve what you did… if it was an exceptionally smart monkey with all kinds of incredibly rare human qualities. But an exceptionally smart monkey is still an average-at-best human.

You’re forgoing your passion project, selling yourself short, and immersing yourself in tedium. Stop it. Leave that shit to content creators. You’re a writer, an artist. Act like it.

Step up to the plate and defy convention a little. Make readers feel challenged. Confuse them by making banana metaphors about mental health, and taking them entirely too far. Don’t explain any of your work to anyone. Negative feedback used to send me into an emotional crisis, I’m comfortable with it now.

“That’s not how storytelling works.”

“Your article is weird and is going to confuse and piss off your readers.”

“This is repulsive.”

All valid feedback, but I’m in no way, writing to gratify. While I may be subject to the ire and ridicule of validated freelance writers across the country, I do have something most of them lack, and it’s called ‘direction.’ A clear and concise view of exactly what I want to achieve, backed by a limitless bucket of inspiration and material, because I’m not afraid to try any batshit idea and see how it works.

And, ya know, plenty of them look… uh… kinda like this… at the end of the day.

Artists experiment and take risks; content creators don’t stray from convention.

Sure, some of those guys will make more money writing than I ever will, and I wish them the best, but there is a trade off. I may never know the reward of owning a home as big as theirs, or owning a home at all, but, they’ll never know the reward of artistic failure. Also, as a lifelong renter, I’ll never have to fix my own water heater.

Experimenting and growing artistically may not pay the bills, but neither does writing.

Understanding how impossibly stacked the deck is against you, as a writer, doesn’t have to be discouraging. Contrarily, I find the futility of being an artist quite liberating. Now I can write articles like these, instead of giving you a numbered list of heart-healthy foods you could have just googled.

Ya didn’t google it, because ya didn’t care. Unrelated, isn’t my Nightmare 2 Mondo Poster bad ass? Ya know, like The Undertaker?

Commercial success is based on whether or not the right person looks at your work at the right time. Period. I don’t care how amazing your work is, if the editors never look at it, you’re never getting published. But let’s say they look at it and it’s generic, run of the mill, by the numbers and, whoa, they actually publish it!

Congrats on your validation. Now everyone knows you can write something that has been written before. You’ll be shocked by how little money they offer you when you compare it with how much time you spent tediously hacking away at that piece of garbage.

There are exactly eight hundred seventy-nine sextillion reasons an editor will reject you and there are just slightly more than zero reasons she will publish you. Please consider as much when shopping your work. Shop it all day, I do, but being a writer is a figurative full time job that is almost always less lucrative than a literal full time job. Consider just getting another one of those literal ones, if pay is your incentive.

Write whatever the fuck you want, and I mean really go nuts. If you’ve been unsuccessfully trying to make a living with your boring, uninspired travel blog, stop writing the fucking thing unless you just love doing it. For the record, if writing commercial content is your passion, I don’t have a problem with you, I just worry many of the folks creating this kind of work only do so because they believe they won’t make a living at writing any other way. That is as illogical a reason as I can comprehend, because more than likely you’ll not make a living at writing in any way.

Maybe you’ve always wanted to write a series about a family of porcupines missing their quills. They resemble shaved prairie dogs, and the other woodland creatures ostracize the porcupine family because of their bizarre appearance. The porcupine family, embarrassed and humiliated, flees to isolation in a cave, finding comfort only in one another, eventually resorting to incestuous relationships between siblings as it’s their only means of romantic companionship.

It’s kind of a ripoff of a V.C. Andrews book, but changing the main characters to naked porcupines is original enough for me to give it a read, and I’m a tough sell.

Change your travel blog over to the porcupine story unannounced and upset all seven of your readers. It’ll be good for them.

Never neglect your potential masterpiece in lieu of nurturing an adequate certainty.

Such behavior is for the frightened and weak-willed. You’re not weak, you’ve been through a lot, and survived. You have amazing stories to tell, and in a voice all your own. To deprive us of those stories because you’re playing it safe would be tragic.

There are no rules.

I’ve passed a lot of English and writing classes with A’s. I understand the rules, swear. Try me.

There are no rules.

You can write any way you want, in any style you want, about any subject you want. You can take huge chances, change tenses without warning, make people uncomfortable, confuse people, no one is owed context or resolution. I’m neither obligated nor inclined to make sense to anyone. You think my articles are garbage? Good, I don’t like yours either. Except for that one, top five Guillermo Del Toro films. You really nailed it with that one.

After literally hours of tests, my doctor told me he couldn’t declare me insane, legally. He gathered a lot of information about me, though, and said although I don’t fit any traditional diagnoses for any identified psychotic disorders, he’s declaring me “out to lunch.” Whatever that means. I only mention this as a neutral point of reference so you can judge for yourself how important my advice is to you.

Creatively speaking, I have no inhibitions and as a result of particularly bad ADHD, my brain doesn’t process organization, really at all, but especially not where abstraction is concerned. So I don’t blame people for not taking as carefree an approach to writing as I do.

Me_IRL

Writers, artists, creatives, when creating, you’re only limited by your comfort zones, fears, and needs for validation.

I’ve long known I’m more the starving type of artist than the adored, breakout type and I wouldn’t change who I am, nor would I change you. I just expect a lot because I know what you’re capable of. You’ve got more to offer than what you’re showing us.

So… who is ready to see a picture of my dogs?