Best Writing Advice I've Heard In A Long Time

"And one really difficult part is that there's a tendency toward censorship - that some thoughts seem too embarrassing, too raw, too naked, too irrelevant, too goofy, too personal, too revealing, too damaging to one's own self-image, too cranky, too individualistic, too specialized, or too much copulating with your mother or something, so that you don't want to put them down. That's a real problem with everybody, including myself. The pudeur, modesty, shyness -- like I failed to write down a dream the other day. Fortunately, I remembered it - I saw Peter Orlovsky catch me smoking, and he's very much antismoking. We were living together, and in the dream he was so dismayed that he vomited up his liver, and I realized that I was really violating something sacrosanct and rooted, physiologically rooted in him, in something real. And I got so scared of the domestic situation that I didn't write the dream down. But it was actually one of the more interesting dream-poem possibilities that I'd had in the last month.

But in the moment of writing, there'll be all sorts of images that rise, "thinks," separate "thinks" that will be unappetizing, and I think that's the most important part. The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, and strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal, because most individual, most particular, most specific, vomiting out a piece of liver, specific situation, smoking. Actually, I thought that was really just my scene, but really it's universal, it's an archetype,as much as anything's an archetype. And that was something I learned from Jack Kerouac,which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing,or could seem to be embarrassing. So the cure for that is to write things down which you'll not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly, to write for nobody's eye, nobody's ear but your own, so you can actually be free to say what you want. In other words, it means abandoning being a poet, abandoning any careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless -- abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mind. And the way that's practiced is that you take the writing out a week later and look at it. It's no longer embarrassing, by that time it seems funny. The blood has dried, sort of. So you really have to make a resolution just to write for yourself, in the sense of no bullshit to impress others, not writing poetry to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying." -- Allen Ginsberg, transcript of lecture "First Thought, Best Thought" given for a Spiritual Poetics course, July 29, 1979 (excerpted from Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation)

Maybe that's not the best ad copy writing advice, but it's decent advice if you're writing a timeless classic that impacts and touches humanity. And if your life is your art.

I wrote that last post without the luxury of tucking pages away in the desk drawer for a week's waiting to let the embarrassment evaporate. The blood's too fresh, as it always is blogging on the real live web, so I still held back.

The family relations thing is more blatent, yet you don't have to read between the lines in my last post to figure out I didn't have enough money to buy an airline ticket to LA myself.

"Maybe you could do a celebrity blog?" my Mom offers as I pick up the Business 2.0 issue off the magazine pile at my sister's home. Mike Arrington is on the front cover of "Blogging for Dollars."

"I don't really see myself doing that," I reply. Normally this would be my cue to roll my eyes and ignore her, but I've changed too much. I actually am not being snarky at all in response.

"You know it wasn't too long ago that Perez Hilton had just four dollars to his name. That's not his real name, you know."

"Well, I have about three myself after that Starbucks latte at the airport."

I bet Mario Lavandeira (aka Perez Hilton) revealed he'd just enough money for a venti pumpkin spice latte after he was already quote successful unquote. A cakewalk then.

I usually don't talk about the fact that I tend to live on the edge. All kind of edges, but particularly the edge of this minute. This moment. Because I think it is too particular, too specific, too personal, too naked, too damaging to one's own self-image, too strange, too revealing, too too too..you name it.

I can even manage to convince myself it'd just freak people out and they'd be unnecessarily anxious for me. Mostly I fear that they'd think the past has anything to do with the present and hold that static vision for me.

"But you don't have a functioning car," says a new friend recently.

"You must underestimate me. Don't get hung up on temporary situations, within a year I'll be able to afford my own Bentley Azure," I write back.

'Nesting' this past Thanksgiving weekend, I viewed more hours of TV than I have in six months. It occurred to me that it is all to easy to hide in consumption, in passitivity, but one always bares something of one self in the act of creation. You put yourself out there when you blog or you post to YouTube, versus snuggling with the mustard throw on the recliner watching The Apprentice.

That's ultimately why I value art and creating and social media. 

"Actually I think I've lined up a job at a local cafe for the holidays."

Now I wait for my Mom's eyes to roll since my announcement is out of character. (Not too mention not going to cover my bills.)

She hesitates for a minute, "I never remember my dreams," she starts. "I mean, I never remember them even when I wake up. But the other night I had a dream and so now it's blurry, but there was this cafe and it's a place that sells tea..."

I tell her about the salon de the (teahouse) I imagine and that's coming to fruition.

So I shall tell you (in time, over time) with the goofy, quirky, trippy, embarrassing parts intact as they happen because they are such as they are: real and anyhow blood-shows-you-are-at-least-alive and not a stilllife portrait of the once living and true.

p.s. My current mantra and motto: The answer to how is yes. (Hell yes.)

Update: On the Perez Hilton quote successful unquote comment, I'm extremely successful according to Bob Dylan: "A person is a success if they get up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do." Anyhow, all I know for sure is I am unabashedly content, dare I say nearly blissful, of late.

images Photo from the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Allen working on Howl in San Francisco, circa June, 1956. Allen Ginsberg's signal poem "Howl," overcame censorship, now one of the most widely read poems of the century." Actually, the date can't be 1956 as he read it in 1955. Many of the greatest works of art from Tropic of Cancer to Madame Bovary were censored in their time, yet self-censorship kills far more art than anything else.

Comments

[Marilyn]

I remind myself a lot these days that 'cash flow' is a very temporary condition. And I like your motto...YES.

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