“Rules for Becoming a Writer,” by Lisa Douglass

Dec 26th, 2012 | By | Category: Nonfiction, Prose

1. Fall in love. It should be noted that there are different versions of love, most of which include one person parasitically sucking off the other, stronger person, but this still can be used to the writer’s benefit. What you do is you label anything love that you can’t figure out, or when a person acts inconsistent—one day happy, one day angry (like father)—and you sleep with that person and you listen to their hopes and dreams and they never ask you about yours and you don’t care because deep inside you know this isn’t the real thing but the sex parts feel good and you really really really like their nose, but inside you know it won’t last. This isn’t love, and you won’t call it love, but it will hurt you when you end it just as if it were real love because the person with the nose you love will cry and act needy and you will go, where is the one guy and or girl who is not needy and just wants to be around me without projecting their past bullshit onto me and assuming that I feel more for them than they feel for me when usually it is not the case? Don’t you remember the story about my dog and how I stopped being able to love after my dog was put to sleep while I was at school? Bambi—I miss him. He loved me. He did hump my leg (not dissimilar from the men I date or even fake date). But, he loved me in a way that no one else can because their private parts steer that part of their brain that they try to idealize and call things love when it is really can I put my privates into your privates and will you be nice to me after and see me as a superhero?

2. Get drunk and take pills. This part is debatable, because sometimes drinking makes you look ugly, but the thing is I’m still young so I DRINK EVERYTHING and drink with a vengeance and drink at people and drink with men without teeth and find myself making out with harelip dude and toothless dude and then have boyfriends that do drugs so I do drugs with them and we HATE each other and HATE ourselves, but it is FUN. The ones who drink are in the most pain and their pain makes it interesting to be them in their confusing sad lives and they are the best writers invariably. I also think the one guy in my class who only likes dogs and hates humans is going in the right direction.

3. Jail. I think if you want to be a writer and you have never been arrested you can still be a nice writer, many people might read you, I just won’t care about it very much. But, I, thankfully, in all my pretentious un-goodness as a human being, am not your only reader, nor will I ever buy your books or think you’re cool at all.

4. Look rad. This one is a must for any writer. It doesn’t have to do with your face as much as keep yourself cool looking. You have to have personal style. That is very important. A style that is not copied or fake. It is your own and while there may be copiers, no one does your style like you do.

5. Learn to hate. I was raised by Seventh Day Adventist/Christian Scientist/Sometimes Cult member parents and they taught me to never lie, never dance, and if you are sick that there is something wrong with you on a deep spiritual level, because you wouldn’t get sick if you could pray rightly. I don’t hate them, but I have learned to hate ideas. Learned to hate people who try to make me feel guilty. Learned to hate parasites. Learned to hate the things in myself that close off to you when you are an ignorant person. Hate has wings. Hate is memorable. You can write about hate. I’d much rather be hated than almost anything else. I love hate.

6. Read astrology. This one sounds totally dumb, but is as real as the rest of them. Look up why people are acting certain ways and find that astrology answers the most predictable of all the questions you would ever have about said person, confirming what you already know but are loathe to say. Then you can admit to yourself that people can be categorized and no one is really unique or even that different from what it says about you on Google. Take me for example—Pisces with Leo rising. I am difficult, self-righteous, and hard to be close to, but once you are in, I am loyal forever. If you cross me, you will go on my dry-erase board and become one of the people I am on a singular mission to destroy psychologically. It will happen. The Pisces may easily swim away if you do one wrong thing, but they never forget a slight. Not EVER. Serious. And while Pisceans are the most loving and giving of the zodiac, their ability to choose inappropriate partners is legendary. But, the Leo rising part makes up for it in ways that will make you scared to be alive. All this is factual and should be paid attention to in legions of ways, so that you can figure everyone out and waste a whole shit ton of time wherein you should be writing.

7. Be irresponsible. (Steal stuff, sleep with bad people, say stuff you don’t mean, fake love fake people, don’t be honest, etc.) This creates the kind of guilt that keeps writers up at night and those writers have very little to do, having already worn out their lover, so they have to write stuff down so that their conscience can catch a break.

8. Lie. This one should be obvious to any would be writer. But, you only tell the truth on paper. Lying and exaggerating facts makes you memorable, and while you never lie on the page you confuse all those around you into thinking you are someone you aren’t and this makes you memorable. (Writers that are real should be memorable.)

9. Be memorable. In all ways, be different. Think different; say different things that no one else would say because they are too concerned with being properly human but not a real human. Don’t cater to societal expectations. Be a nice person one day a mean person the next.

10. Write. While this is something that should be obvious to anybody, it isn’t. You should write every day and have opinions about the world you live in that are sacrilegious and scary to others. But don’t fabricate this—they must be the secret things inside of yourself that you secretly think but would never ever say because you are too polite to say to someone’s face. Say those things. Like when I broke up with you and I said the sex was good I only said it to make your face stop crying. I didn’t say it because it was real.

11. Be more yourself. I don’t know what else to say about this one. Only you know what that means. But, if you are secretly copying anybody, trying to be like somebody else in any way, style, dress, speech, or thought, stop that shit and become what you were born to become. YOUR OWN PERSON.

12. Eat things that aren’t known to be food, like hotpockets.

13. Question God or ideas on God or all the ideas that are in your head. Ask yourself, are these my own made-up ideas, or did I steal them, or was I infected by someone else’s thinking to believe them? Do this every day about everything until you are able to generate your own ideas not tainted by socialization, weird parenting, or psychologically abusive “friends.”

14. Dump people that are dicks. Do not let people around you that don’t make you feel better or suffer in some way, but for sure get rid of the dicks. Especially if they are dumb.

15. Burn things in your oven. Food because you fell asleep, but other things are fun to burn in there too. Use your imagination. Effigies of people you like or don’t like for example.

————

Defenestration-Lisa DouglassLisa Douglass spent her summer watching a stalker through her window and wondered if she could go outside via the roof. Only, whenever she tried there were sheets of chocolate lining the stairs and it seemed so messy. Lisa became tired and unclean. She hoped the stalker was eating well and that he had a change of clothes, adult diapers and all. Lisa Douglass was trapped, and that meant eating copious amounts of Nutella and sleeping all day under her makeshift indoor rain device. Sometimes she had visitors and they got wet, but no one knows what she did with them after. Just that during the visitations they learned to talk in baby dinosaur language and how to fashion a trap for a medium sized human being.

Tags: , ,

Comments are closed.