This will be the first in a series of maddeningly good authors giving advice on writing. Enjoy.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr life

5. Something that you feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow

8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the holy contour of life

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

29. You’re a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

The writers of the Beat Generation: proof that being social can be a boon to your writing rather than a detriment.

I realized I wanted to be a writer sophomore year of high school, when I learned that engineering–my former ambition–required practicing actual math and science. Not for me.

Impressionable as any 16-year-old, the “writer lifestyle” became all too important to me. I turned to what I thought was the writer look: black-rimmed glasses, messy hair (the natural way), and wrinkled button-ups rolled to my elbows. I adopted the apparent “writer mindset.” My opinions became gold, fart jokes became immature, and as far as I was concerned, no one was capable of understanding the “depth” of my writing.

I lost quite a few friends that year.

Writing itself is a solitary act, a lonely act. However, I’ve learned­­––the hard way––that the solitude of writing doesn’t and shouldn’t have to affect writers’ social lives. Read more »