How to become a BETTER writer!!!

Oh man! Writing is fuuuuuuun. Deep too. Here’s some tips (haha, get it????!?!?!) on how to do it (hahahaha, get it again) BETTER!

1. Avoid not having fun, silly.

2. Use some nice words nicely.

3. Watch as all you have done, all you have made becomes undone and unmade by a heartbreak you didn’t quite expect, didn’t want to because you were busy writing and reading and trying to make sense of her, your love, who made you write and read in the first place. She. A start. Told you that all writing was honest and you needed to use this authenticity before thinking of the paper and keys. Continue a sentence with full being, lest ending it meant ending your life. Be truthful. On the outside, put yourself inside. Write your you into existence so that when a person falls along your lines like leaves starving for warmth and with their umbilical cord stems cut, they will cry and want to coo the baby. Sh. Sh. I am here. I am here for your love.

And she was, sometimes, not always, but enough for you to find a smile and a laugh and a few kisses that showed you why lips existed. Led to times in bars with the rooms spinning feelings of being straight and easy. Restaurants with messy faces and food too spicy. Moments of watching each other pee, wondering how intimacy can be drawn up in bounds but remain boundless. Three years wedged in hugs and hopes and her where after it all, and you mean it all – the fights and makeups and combative political beliefs and the peace and the sex and the abstaining and the ands too – you create a book for her by her through her. A small hardcover book of letters composed by hand. Pictures interleaved. Honesty engrained.

Then there she is reading it on a couch in the afternoon saying this is beautiful, Kacper, this is true, this means so much to me. You mean so much to me.

It’s a shame because after she said it, you can’t think of better prose. But you try. You write a bit more and cobble some nice sentences and really think you were getting close to getting it all down so you could rest in her arms and have her hair along with your breath, up and down with your life, until you found she was cheating on you for seven months.

You find out by asking him. You are reminded against the blinking sun and the heavy concrete that research, research, research grounds writing. Write what you know.

But you don’t know what to feel now. For so long, you felt because of her. But most of it was as made up as your words. They were good words, strong words, reliable words. But none of them sound right in response. They’re floppy. Useless. Not coming out of you like they did when they did, and when they do, they sink to the floor like the few birds who never learn to fly. The nest was too warm.

There’s cold now even though the days are sun-steeped and summer is bleeding life. Fiction didn’t prepare you. You imagine yourself brushing it all off and becoming again. Turning a page, the whole wazoo of character development and moralizing and knowing that at the end, there is an end. You can only think of that finality, how courageous it must be to go on before the average life and the growing blur and the okay-well-i-have-this-and-that-and-well-myself-if-nothing-else invades. How complete it must be to not worry about completeness.

You don’t want to kill yourself, but you often think about those people who sit in chairs for so long that their hair and skin starts growing in the furniture. Or about lying on the floor and waiting for the world to go first, please, after you or you hope that the dust will collect overtime to suffocate you or perhaps there will be a leak from the plumbing upstairs by an overzealous buffet dinner that’ll fill the room more than the weeping mess that cannot drown or maybe a plane will mistake your still body for a landing pad for you have gotten so small and forgotten. The sun cries in. The blinds are revealing, you remind yourself. You have left yourself down.

Sleep is hard. Eating doesn’t help. The birds are too loud. They swear in a language you’ll never understand that winter is coming and you should enjoy the now by making love and loss and being happy for the chance of both. You close the window with new blinds. You close your eyes with old ones. Your desk is a shell-shock of pop cans and Cheetos and cum. There’s alcohol in this trench somewhere. You can’t remember where it is, whether it emptied before you did.

You’re ready to come back to this, though. You’re prepared to make it all all again. Worthwhile. Beautiful. True. So you move. You write. Type type type. Spit spit. Dripping. Not hungry. Nothing in fridge anyways. Space. Fuck fuck. Hrm. That’s good. Ya. Pen is out. Spooling. Ideas. Not great. Many bad. All awful. God. Can’t you think? Ceiling. Blameless, faceless. Pick away at cheek. Spot expands. Look at fingers. A bit woozy. White and red. Pick again. Hurts a bit. Screen scattered. Needless nightmare. Five am. Not tired. More more more. Page better. Some form. Rhythm. Nod. Not tired. Dictionary. Thesaurus. Google. Not tired. Fridge mocks with empty mouth again. Hot room. Drip again. Come back as waste to waste with waste. Clean tomorrow. Always tomorrow. Life is yesterday’s tomorrow. Like the sound of that. Look to ceiling. Approves. Write down phrase. Sounds stupid. Edit. Erase. Read. Erase. Write. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Erase. Peace.

Not tired.

Then days or is it months pass and you sit up or are you sitting down and you get something or does it get you like this. You hate that this is vague and nonspecific and that you do nothing about it. You try once more. You move on. Next sentence. This one. Equally bad. Equally general. Equally devastated by the time and space and her.

What is she doing? What hasn’t she done? What haven’t you allowed?

You’re sure there’s some good words there in the answers, though you never want to write them and never want to read them and to the writer who does both, you wish the best for you had it once and now you have no nows and don’t know how to get them back. Past consumes.

But you’ve only been good at moving forward. So you sit down – or is it up – for the last time – or is it the first. Hard to concentrate. What do you know? That you’re alone. That you’ve always been alone. That that is how you did this all for her and that this is how you write – leaving to re-enter, absence for presence, her for he.

So you listen. You’re still. The seat hurts. The building looks like stars dying. Your fridge is the universe, cold and longing, stretching into a laugh each time you open up to it. You have nothing to say. She has gone to be read by others.

You know what to put down now: she lied.

It is your best work. It is your worst. You are finally tired. And oh how you are hungry.

4. DON’T LOL ABOUT NEEDLESS CAPITALS AND EXCLAMATIONS!!!