Dear aspiring writer

… what you do — that is, write — is your irrepressible need; it comes naturally to you, because you have been reading fiercely ever since you learned to spell.

By now you have refined the style and learned all the techniques. Maybe you are even good. But you need to know one thing: like you there are millions, all at your level, all who consider writing a reason for living, all deserving. An army of jackals disguised as cultural promoters has formed around you. For some time now, the business has no longer been about the book that is sold, but about what is not yet there. And ahead with the evaluators, the editors, the award organizers, the writers’ site builders, the printers, the bookbinders, the creative writing teachers, the agents.

You will submit your novel to major publishing houses. They will reject it a priori, unless you are already famous for other reasons, unless you represent a paranormal phenomenon, or you know someone very high up. You will turn to paid publishers. They will turn you off so as not to print even a copy of the book, or to print a few that will end up in the pulp.

You will opt for publishers who are honest enough not to ask for a deposit. Your work will not be distributed and libraries will refuse to purchase it. You will have to buy the copies, which will be the equivalent of paying a fee, and you will have to scramble around to sell them, like pots or towels. Maybe you are not the type to do it, maybe you will feel like you are debasing your work and you will see it die in your hands.

You will orient yourself on self publishing, convenient for those who are shy and penniless. Your book will have a high price due to shipping costs. Even your aunt won’t buy it. People are happy to spend 20 euros on a shirt they wear twice, but not on a novel that has cost years of sweat. In the meantime, however, your book will be considered published, even without an ISBN, and major publishers, who only have to gain from boycotting self-publishing, will refuse to review it. (If, however, miraculously, it were to become famous, they would certainly have no qualms about co-opting him). Always for the same reason, you will no longer be able to participate in literary prizes for unpublished works. And perhaps not even for published. In short, your text will no longer be unpublished, nor published, nor meat, nor fish.

Ah, and remember that if by any chance you are over forty, most of the major awards are closed to you. You might not have won them anyway, but at least they could let you try.

You will fall back on friends, lovingly binding manuscripts to givethem as presents at Christmas. After months of silence, you will risk asking for news. They’ll say they’ve been too busy to read your stuff. After that, neither you nor them will ever mention it again.

This, dear aspiring writer, is the future of your novel, it will remain a cover image that will age with you, that will bore everyone and even you who wrote it.

You, if you like, write it anyway. In any case, at home, toilet paper is always handy. Then get a lot of reviews, especially by those who know less than you, hold your nose if you find spelling errors and cultural blunders in the criticism. Subscribe to all Facebook groups where even remotely they talk about books. Remember to attend them every day, always greeting the administrator with due respect, inserting hearts, flowers, soft toys, cups of steaming coffee in the morning and chamomiles in the evening, lavishing kisses in profusion, asking about the health of dogs and cats of all participants. If they throw a party for yet another member, be the first, at five in the morning, to toast with virtual sparkling wine and set off online firecrackers. Extract catchy phrases from your book for your friends to write in their secret diary and share on their message boards.

Never say what you really think, click on I like it until you get the mouse cramp, even if you feel like throwing up, lick the right asses with abundance and intensity, advertise other people’s books that make you sick. If some provincial writer tells of “impertinent bachelors”, or of “gripped crimes” affirm that they are poetic licenses of a new late-romantic-illiterate style that is developing, and to the umpteenth infatuated male who describes orgasms of improbable housewives in fregola, speak of Dionysian aspects and Gnosticism, without forgetting, I recommend, a reference to Bachofen’s matriarchy.

Always be enthusiastic about everything literary bloggers of a certain weight say, especially those who read Tolstoy every night before bed, and if they say that Dante Alighieri was an up-and-coming to be nipped in the bud and that Leopardi wrote hilarious stuff, find something to support their views.

Link your book 400 to 500 times a day, with exactly 6 minute intervals between each post.

Tag everyone, really everyone, even the butcher, even the hitchhiker you met in August in Sardinia, even the contact from Los Angeles who is asleep at this hour but, you never know, perhaps he suffers from insomnia.

If an obscure minor poet from Uzbekistan dies, share lines from his impenetrable poems, calling him an “unbridgeable loss” to world culture, showing yourself personally heartbroken. Talk about him as if he were family, regret the good old days when you and he were having coffee under the Brandenburg Gate talking together about Mayakovsky.

Photograph your book in all positions, nicely surrounded by plants, languidly lying between cushions, devoutly under the photo of Padre Pio or, better still, of the Pope. If your surname begins with M, immortalize it between Manzoni and Moravia. It is also advisable to sneak it into the window of the most important bookshop in your city, take a photo of it with your mobile phone, next to the millionaire best seller of the moment, then collect it before the saleswoman notices it.

If possible, die. It always has a certain effect and attracts sympathy and approval.

They will tell you: “Keep writing, it would be a shame not to, you vent through it, it is your art, your creativity.”

Yes, of course, but for what, for whom? The most trivial answer is for yourself. But you don’t write for yourself, perhaps not even the diary. You write to channel emotions, stem them and organize them into an organic whole that becomes a creature, a new life, a secondary world. You write to reread and say: “Holy shit, how nice this piece, did I write it in a trance?” you write to create a story that wasn’t there and now is, and will be forever, to forge characters who have moral depth and physical density. You write above all by rewriting, with painstaking effort, polishing up to reach the final line, the one crystalline, musical and given once and for all, the one that, when you reread it even after many years, still makes you vibrate.

But, one wonders, what is the use of writing a novel nowadays? Who will read it, apart from your mother, your sister, and your dear, kind, compassionate Facebook friends, even though now the more contacts you have the less visible you are?

Beyond publication, sales, literary awards, reviews, litblogs, print and online magazines, Facebook pages dedicated to fiction, specialized sites, creative writing courses, editors and paid editing, Book Fairs, conferences, meetings on books and who talks about books and how to talk about who talks about books, what is the meaning of a new novel in this shapeless mass of writing, of beautiful, ugly, very ugly, so-so texts?

Anyone who puts a sexual thought or fantasy on paper now feels authorized to publish, to disseminate, given the ease of the medium, anyone who plants a line on a white sheet, equips it with exclamation or suspension points to indicate emotions that he is not capable to express, believes himself to be so much poet as to participate in the famous prize of Caciocavallo of Vattelappesca. The illusion of being a narrator, a poet, a journalist, a critic, grabs you only because you are able to post a piece on Wordpress or on Blogger, just as, eons ago, you imagined yourself to be Hemingway only owning a typewriter.

In short, the more you enter this world, the more the matter swells, expands, disperses, becomes amorphous and self-referential.

How to emerge, therefore, how to distinguish yourself even from the homonyms, from the clones that proliferate? How to assure your innocent creatures the right to live, to take shape in the eyes and mind of a reader?

And what you, the author, have written, what value does it have? Is it beautiful, is it mediocre, is it mainstream, is it literature, is it poetry, is it rubbish, is it trash? Why should anyone read your novel rather than another’s, rather than millions of others? And does it still make sense to write in this unfiltered magma, knowing that you are a drop in the bucket, that you are sending a message in a bottle?

Here I am, I don’t have an answer. And you?