Life is a Shitty First Draft — You Only Get Rewrites if You’re Buddhist

Søren Kierkegaard said: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

I’ve thought about that a lot lately for a number of reasons both personal and philosophical.

What stories do you tell yourself about your life?

If your life was a book, written by someone you’ve read, who’d be the author?

Would anyone care to read it? Will your life make more sense when you’re dead? And what’s the best way to live forwards?

Life’s a shitty first draft — you only get rewrites if you’re Buddhist.

Constant roadkill

Life is a journey. Time is a truck. We are roadkill.

Let go of everything but the moment for the moment is all that you have.

Death falls away from you at different speeds.

Sudden death and you get parted from your illusions real fast.

Slow death and you’re forced to hurt and contemplate every day.

Which is how this feels. And how you should write.

Aim for the page, not the words

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” 

— Annie Dillard

I scribbled down my thoughts upon reading Annie Dillard’s ‘The Writing Life.’

Throughout the entire book whenever she talks about anything she’s really talking about writing.

We’re all going home in an ambulance. Write what you want.

Write a surface run-off anxiety diary of how your writing is going. But use ‘you’ instead of ‘I.’

Then publish it, as it comes, as how to write type blog posts and articles.

It’s ok to want a manual typewriter and make a lot of mess and noise. You’ll just have to type it up again later.

But the page is your chopping block and you can lay out the physical pages on your desk.

Fuck digital metaphors, go for the real thing.

The metaphors will hold and work better if you’re already grounded in the real thing.

Question: WHO WILL TEACH ME TO WRITE?

Answer: THE PAGE

(ref. Dillard)

“There is another way of saying this. Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood, aim for the chopping block.”

Aim for the page and the words will follow.

Death is just your day job

“This is your life, good to the last drop. Doesn’t get any better than this. This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.” 

— Fight Club

Death is just your day job — it’s where you spend most of your time.

Life is like a two-week vacation.

We were all dead to begin with. Then two weeks in the sun. Then death again afterwards for eternity.

Welcome to earth. Try to enjoy your stay.

Did you enjoy your holiday? Did you miss any tourist traps or beauty spots in-between?

Tough. Time’s up. You’ve had your stay.

Whatever you do right now is what you did with your life.

Life’s whatever you do with your life whilst you try to figure out what life is.

Do animals think about it? They know how to live. Our ability to think is both a blessing and a curse.

Life is whatever you do from moment to moment.

Do you want to spend your moments present or in absentia?

You’re on holiday. Try to make the most of it.

The write stuff

“Living a life is like writing a novel. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, neither the life nor the novel is going to turn out good.” 

— Luke Rhinehart

They give you drugs for your symptoms, drugs for your depressions and a name for your condition which is just your symptoms in latin.

Your butt hurts? You’ve got Buttus Hurtius.

I’ve been treated for depression before, but I don’t want to be drugged out of my basic position that the world is wrong — and that someone needs to do something about it.

What do you want to write today?

“to create / out of his own imagination / the beauty of his wild / forbears — a mythology / he cannot inherit” 

— Allen Ginsberg, from “Wild Orphan” 1952

What do you want to do with your writing?

What do you want to do that writing can help you to do?

I’m not talking about fame and fortune or winning the publication lottery.

What does writing do for you right now?

The world does not know your name

Beyond a handful of family and friends, the world does not know your name.

Probably.

That’s how it is for most of us.

But that’s not what we want.

And maybe there’s something a little broken about a culture that makes us want little else except to be famous.

Sleep on it

According to Arthur Koestler, Hungarian-British author and journalist, all forms of invention and discovery have a common pattern that he terms “bisociation” — a blending of elements drawn from two previously unrelated areas of thought to create new meaning.

According to random notes I scribbled in my notebooks years ago, and no longer understand, I need to “bisociate personal unconscious issues with universal unconscious concerns to create a work of art” and “see the universal in the particular.”

Koestler also thought that bisociative creative breakthroughs occur after periods of intense mental effort, working on the creative goal or problem, in a relaxed state when rational thought goes out of the window — such as during dreams and trances.

In other words, I’m off to bed.

Dream Narratives

“A dream is a poem the body writes. Even if we lie to ourselves in the day, the body is compelled to speak its truth at night.” 

— Sandra Cisneros

Dreams are creative of themselves, even without interpretation.

They’re your creation — no-one else's.

Dreams can be the source of stories, but they require reworking to make the personal universal in appeal.

Record your dreams to gain insight and see changes over time.

Write down your dreams as though they’re stories — it’s much more fun than trying to tell your dream to someone else.

Keep a dream diary

Keep a notebook in bed with you — or at least close by.

Write down your dreams.

Read them out loud.

Narrate your own dreams when you wake.

Then try to write them, in detail, as stories later.

Brainstorm and cluster around your original ideas.

Your brain created your dreams — they’re yours to use.

A thing as dreamless will have a dream

“Books had always offered her a refuge as deep and rapidly accessed as sleep and she emerged from them as reluctantly and in a similar fog.”

— Patrick Gale

There are two aspects to dreaming in an empty room:

1. The dream

2. The empty room you see immediately after waking up

The empty room is a clean slate.

You can put anything in the empty room.

A dream, however, is always grounded in reality.

Dreams have . . . well, not rules. Not constructs. Not even “logic.”

All they need to keep us from waking up is a sense of the real.

Dreams have terrorists.

Dreams have presidents, hostage situations.

Write or the puppy gets it

I dreamt that I was a published novelist who donated the proceeds from his works to charities in appropriate and amusing ways.

For example, in one novel my main character killed kittens. So from every copy sold, I donated a percentage to animal shelters and catteries, saving kittens etc. Ditto the other books.

I also encouraged my readers to do charitable things in the name of the novels. For example, they gave blood and ran blood donors recruitment drives upon the launch of a vampire novel.

Each book benefited a different cause. They attended anti-vivisection and pro-vegetarian rallies for one book, and participated in sleep research for another, which was a book of dream-inspired short stories.

All the books were eco-friendly, carbon neutral, made from recycled paper and I planted trees for every book sold.

This would perhaps be a fun way to behave after getting published, but in the dream it back-fired. Readers demanded more books and threatened to do unspeakable things if I didn’t come up with the goods.

They kidnapped dogs and held them to ransom. One dog would be released after each novel was published. So long as I met their demands the dogs were fine. But after I while, I ended up with writers block.

Their ultimatum: “Write or the puppy gets it.”

So whenever I’m stuck I say: “Write or the puppy gets it.”

What do you write?

What do you write?

Words.

Words?

Words.

I once tried to write that in response to a Goodreads ‘ask the author’ Q&A.

Goodreads said my answer was too short which was annoying as “Words, words, words” is a line by William fucking Shakespeare!

There’s a beautiful quote by Carlos Fuentes where he said: “Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.”

That just about covers it.

But when asked what I write I usually just grunt and say “Words” before making a hasty retreat.

Nothing to see here, move along

They say you should face your fears.

One of my biggest fears is that someone will read my notebooks and realise that I’m mad, that I can’t write, and that even when I do write, my first drafts are so terrible that I should be shot in the name of literature.

Buy milk, write novel

What’s on your to do list?

Mine’s all ‘Buy milk, write novel.’

I want to know I’m on track and going to be ok. Same shit, different day.

I’ve wanted the same things for at least 15 years.

I kept getting the urge to go to Japan and commit suicide.

It finally occurred to me that this vision might be a story, and not careers advice, so I should write about it instead.

It’s because you don’t pay enough attention to your dreams they still hold your attention.

I also need to buy milk.

Deleted notes

I never know what to do and I’m still waiting for a hint.

But my batteries are flat and this is game over unless I can figure out how to make it to the next level.

Level up. Keep going.

It has nothing to do with defeating them out there and everything to do with you inside just doing what you want.

Keep going. We can do this you can do this. Dreams will teach you what to do.

Trust your own instinct and you’ll be fine.

Keep going do not give up and don’t give in but do what works for you.

There is always a long way round. And a short-cut to the truth.

You were thinking about minimalism the other day.

It was something along the lines that you need to keep things closest to you that are most valuable.

And so things are less worth keeping the further from you they are.

No need to get attached.

We tell ourselves stories all the time

What are avenues for being present?

Observe.

When you notice that your mind has made up a story about the past or the future, simply observe it.

Observation of the story will bring you right into the present.

After a while, you’ll start to notice that you are not your story, and that two separate entities exist: you in the present and your mind with its story.

The saddest thing of all is that, in these hours of sitting here, I’ve gotten so little writing done.

I’ve been thinking and sleeping mostly.

Given that I’m about to go out and try to be entertaining, when I’ve been feeling anything but, I guess that’s ok.

Go easy on yourself — no-one else is going to.

Notes scribbled on the back of a napkin

Ship every day.

Automate the process and get out of the way.

Why are brain dumps and Twitter sarcasm so relatively easy?

Is it because you don’t care or because they’re fun to do? Probably a bit of both.

Nobody is going to die if they don’t get to read your words.

I guess you could say the same about anything you write or anything you do.

Who knows.

All I know is this:

Shut up and write.

Things to do on Twitter when you’re dead

You’re born on an assembly line, brought up on an assembly line, schooled on an assembly line, work on an assembly line, and die on an assembly line.

You’re replaceable.

You’ve got to control what you look at.

Every life is a suicide.

Every life is a suicide.

Every life is a suicide.

Sorry, wrong meeting.

I wrote a letter to God once, but I never got a reply. God is next to Santa on my list of unreliable people.

In fantasy land, I can well imagine using Twitter as a promotional tool for writers.

In reality, you still have to do the writing.

Otherwise the other shit is pointless.

Best writing advice I ever received: The only person that can stop you from writing is you. So don’t.

Earn your ending

I’ll tell you a secret. The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit. Find an ending, but don’t cheat, and don’t you dare bring in a deus ex machina. Your characters must change, and the change must come from them. Do that, and you’ll be fine.

How it ends doesn’t matter.

All that matters is that it ends.

Wait — that’s life, not fiction.

Endings are really fucking important.

First draft suicide note

“For those who understand, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, no explanation will suffice.”

I watch a documentary about Hubert Selby Jr, and alive and moved as it makes me feel, I still think about killing myself.

The soul is old and restless and tired.

It wants to leave the body and go somewhere quiet and peaceful.

Not to rest — to be left alone.

So I plan to skip out on life in the next few days, like some people skip out of class or miss a doctor’s appointment. Just to be done with it, you know?

No big reason. Just sick of being here still, in pain and dying slow.

Everything I write is so fucking toothless it makes me sick to look at it.

I can’t escape the fact that I still want to die. That I still don’t feel like I have a choice. That I still can’t fucking write to save my soul.

Death won’t come howling out of you like a vengeful ghost. Silence will.

I’m not supposed to talk of these things. And anyway I’ve nothing to say. Fuck off.

Famous last words, kid. Famous last words.*

*I wrote that several years ago. I’m still here — which counts for something. Whenever you feel that way, write a note — but don’t act. Just sleep on it. Take notes. Write down your dreams. Tell a friend. Keep going.

“Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.”

― William S. Burroughs

James Garside is an independent journalist, author, and travel writer. Join Chapter 23 for the inside track on all their creative projects and insights about life, work, and travel.