How to Cure Writer's Block

One question that other writers often ask me is, “How do you deal with writer’s block?” You know, those days when the words aren’t flowing, your brain feels like a sack of wet cement, and you can feel the will to live draining from your body as the time slowly passes, the sentences fail to accumulate, and the uselessness of your existence becomes increasingly impossible to deny.

Many writers fear such days. But when I encounter writer’s block, I breathe a huge sigh of relief, crack open a cold one, and start celebrating. Why? Because if you wake up with writer’s block, it means you are now gifted with a day in which you don’t have to write—a day you can spend doing all kinds of things that are more fun than handcuffing yourself to a keyboard and spitting electrons out into space for hours on end.

I like to play golf when I have writer’s block. Golf is the perfect sport for writers, because it too is pointless and frustrating, and, like writing, even if you play golf a lot, there’s no guarantee you’re going to get any better at it.

Golf can kickstart a writer’s imagination in all kinds of constructive ways. For example, golfers like to keep score, and most are honest about recording the actual number of shots it took them to get the ball in the hole. But when writer/golfers record their score on each hole, they don’t just add up the shots and slap a number on the card—rather, they use their imagination to re-play the hole in their mind, eliminating the poorest shots and recording instead an enhanced, improved score. (Personally, I don’t know why more golfers don’t score using this method, because I’ve found that it can save ten or twenty strokes a round.)

The point is, a writer suffering from writer’s block who goes out and plays golf isn’t actually playing golf—he is using golf as a mental vehicle to work through his writer’s block and come out on the other side, fresh and inspired and ready, once again, to face the agony of the blank page.

If a round of golf doesn’t work, I'll often head to the racetrack. I find betting on the ponies to be quite effective in combatting the terror of writer’s block. During every race, as the horses are rounding the far turn, I can sense ideas burbling up in the back of my head—and, as I curse and scream and wave my ticket in the air, I can feel my blocked thoughts starting to dissolve.

Unfortunately, that feeling disappears as soon as the horses cross the finish line. Because if I win, I have to immediately start thinking about my bet for the next race, so I can double my money. And if I lose, I have to immediately start thinking about my bet for the next race so that I can win back the money I just lost. True, a well-bet trifecta can jumpstart the imagination like nothing else, but if I win one of those, my imagination tends to run so wild that I can’t remember any of it the next day. There are usually clues in my hotel room, but making sense of it after the fact can be a challenge.

My advice to writers battling writer’s block is to stop fighting it and start enjoying it. In my book, every day you can avoid having to write is a good day, and if you can stretch it out for a week or a month, so much the better. That gives you time to go on mind-cleansing fishing trips or travel to places where they don’t even speak the language in which you write. Japanese sake recharges the imagination extremely well, I’ve found, as does tracking down big game in Africa (Hemingway’s favorite trick), or getting massages in Thailand.

In short, writer’s block is a blessing, not a curse. Having to write is the curse. If you can avoid it, consider yourself lucky. Trust me, there are better things to do with your time.

My Writing Journal: An Inside Look

Ever since I was a young, I have kept a journal—of thoughts, observations, story ideas, overheard conversations, stuff people write on bathroom walls, etc.—as a means of fueling the creative process. Some journal entries get fleshed out into stories or get included in a narrative somehow, but most do not. Most writers do not share the contents of their journals, either, for fear that their raw, unprocessed thoughts might betray the true chaos of their inner life.

But I am not most writers, so—in the interest of full disclosure, and to help my biographer understand my own creative process—I thought it might be instructive to share a few recent entries from my journal:

Thought: If there are ever golf courses on Mars, the sand traps will be red, so it will be easier to find your ball.

Observation: Unless you own a helicopter, it is impossible to look at both sides of a cloud.

Story idea: A woman who eats so many French fries that she actually becomes a Yukon potato. Then she decides she wants to become a zucchini. The national veggie council says no, that’s illegal, but you can become a yam. This she does. When her friends ask her why she’s not a potato anymore, she shrugs her shoulders and says, “I yam what I yam.”

Seen on the street: A man letting a dog drink water from his hat.

Question #1: How did the man get my hat?

Question #2: When did the man steal my dog?

Question #3: Why is my wife yelling at the man?

Question #4: Can I get this man to mow my lawn and pay my mortgage too?

Question #5: Why didn’t I think of this sooner?

Thought: Illness and disease are the universe’s way of saying that you are sick.

Occurrence: This morning, I cut my finger and it bled. But the blood wasn’t red, it was green. This doesn’t seem right.

Observation: There are no meat-flavored ice creams.

Million-dollar idea: Meat-flavored ice cream.

Thought: Life has no meaning. But it does have pizza. Balance is everything.

Question: When the Greeks said, “Everything in moderation,” did they intend it to apply to Costco?

Musing: There ought to be a word for that feeling you have when the toilet won’t flush, and is rising instead, and people are outside waiting to use it. Current vocabulary options are inadequate and redundant.

Observation: The Golden Gate Bridge is really orange. And there is no gate.

Sad truth: Age discrimination tends to disproportionately affect people who are old.

Story Idea: A man in a clown outfit gets abducted by aliens, who get so scared that they leave Earth forever, taking the clown with them. Centuries later, on a planet far, far away, there lives a civilization populated entirely by clowns. In a bold attempt to communicate with life beyond their own planet, they build a giant bicycle horn, point it at the sky, and honk it. It does not work. This makes the clowns sad.

Reminder: The lasagna in the fridge is getting fuzzy.

Concern: The dogs do not look friendly today.

Thought: Hospitals are not very hospitable.

Conundrum: Where did my good pair of underwear go?

Observation: There are bats everywhere.

Don't Let Digital Obsolescence Destroy Your Legacy

One of the reasons I write is the sense of immortality that comes from knowing that, after I’m dead, my words will live on. Recently, however, I have become concerned that my words may not live as long as I thought.

Most forms of digital media—CDs, DVDs, flash drives, etc.—start to degrade after a hundred years or so, and there’s no guarantee that computers or e-readers will be able to display them in the future. Anything stored in the cloud or on the Internet could disappear in an instant—from a massive power-grid failure, a global cyber-attack, nuclear war, or some clever teenager with a laptop. And no matter how often you back your writing up, all it takes to destroy years of work is one devious three-year-old waving a magnet over your hard drive.  

Older forms of media are no guarantee of immortality, either. Newsprint yellows and disintegrates in just a few years, and magazines and books can easily be destroyed by fire, mold, or flooding. And as we all know, libraries—which used to be an important sanctuary for the written word—are now just places where homeless people hang out and look at porn.

This issue is of particular concern to me because I estimate it will take several hundred years for the world’s arbiters of genius to recognize my contribution to the literary arts. Therefore, I need to be certain that, centuries from now, scholars have ample opportunity to distort and misinterpret my work without having to dig through a landfill for an old Macbook Pro.

In order to ensure my own immortality, then—and, incidentally, secure my rightful place in literary history—I have decided to publish my next book on the most durable form of media civilization has ever known: clay tablets.

The book, due out next year, will consist of four-hundred ten-by-twelve tablets made from high-quality Mesopotamian clay cured for several hours at twenty-four-hundred degrees. Each tablet will weigh approximately ten pounds, and can be stored underground for thousands of years. Amazon will deliver the book one-hundred tablets at a time, in four semi-trailer loads, all at once or in stages, whichever the reader prefers.

In addition to lasting for several millennia, the advantage of clay tablets, like traditional books, is that they don’t have to be plugged in or recharged. Misplaced pages are easy to find, as well, and finished pages can be re-purposed as pizza stones, bread boards, coasters, trivets, or any number of other household items. Kids can build forts with them. Grandma can stick a page or two under her wheelchair to keep from rolling downhill. Dad can keep a load in the back of his pickup for better traction on icy winter roads. The possibilities are endless.

Clay tablets are also an excellent vehicle for advertising. Consider: It will take people an average of three to five years to read my book, extending the all-important metric of reader “engagement” well beyond any other medium. And, because the pages are almost impossible to dispose of, an advertiser’s message could continue to reach people for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years.

Given the relative fragility of digital media and the absolute certainty of technological obsolescence, it’s clear to me that clay tablets are the literary media of the future. They’re virtually indestructible, environmentally friendly, and any kid with a hose and some dirt can make them, so barriers to entry for anyone who wants to publish on them are practically non-existent. You don’t even need a hose—anyone can go down to the banks of the Mississippi River today and load up on as much tablet-making muck as they want.

Think of the possibilities. Are you a poet or songwriter? All you need is a bucket or two of mud to immortalize your work forever! Sure, short-story writers might need to rent a pickup, and novelists might need to hire a dredge—but that’s a small price to pay for guaranteed immortality.

Writers everywhere: If you want to make sure that your work endures the unpredictable ravages of time, join me in ditching the Internet, scrapping your laptop, and abandoning all forms of electronic technology. All you really need, after all, is a shovel, a bucket, and the sincere desire to make literary history. 

Can a Bunch of Typing Monkeys Write a Best-Seller?

It’s been said that if a million monkeys typed for a million years, they’d eventually whap out the complete works of William Shakespeare. During a recent bout of writer’s block, I decided to test this theory in a somewhat scaled-down form.

Instead of a million chimpanzees, I bought a dozen rhesus monkeys and set them up in my garage. I didn’t need them to write a Shakespeare play. Nobody reads Shakespeare anymore. My plan was to train twelve of these little fellows to type for a few months in the hope that they’d come up with a John Grisham thriller or something by Danielle Steele. You know, the kind of book people pick up at the airport or grocery store—something marketable and easy to read.

To get the experiment started, I set up a dozen workstations, with a standard Dell computer at each desk. Each monkey was assigned a computer, and I gave each one his or her own password. Next, I taught them how to log on to Google docs, since I can’t afford twelve licenses for Microsoft Word, and showed them how to set up a collaborative document, which would record the output of their massive monkey mind-meld.

Immediately, there were problems. Two of the younger monkeys insisted I buy them iPads, and claimed they couldn’t work in such an oppressively structured environment. They wanted to roam around the backyard, where, they claimed, inspiration was more likely to strike.

All the other monkeys except for one were completely stumped by the whole password thing, and got so angry that they started smashing their keyboards and screens. Maybe equipment damage wasn’t an issue when the million-monkey theorem was first proposed. But nowadays, a dozen monkeys with insufficient tech support can cause thousands of dollars in damage in less than ten minutes.

Since I declined the monkey-mayhem protection policy at Best Buy, I had to drain my savings to buy a new set of computers. When the replacement computers arrived, I did the smart thing and unlocked them so all the monkeys had to do was bang on the keys for eight hours a day.

Turns out monkeys are lazy, though, and get bored of poking at computer keys after about five minutes. They also do not like to sit still. None of them would stay in their seats. Before noon on the first day there were monkeys swinging from the ceiling and hopping from desk to desk, screeching and howling and making as much noise as they possibly could. The neighbors complained. The police issued me a warning. Still, there was little I could do to round up my renegade monkeys and keep them on task.

I tried everything to regain their cooperation and trust—more frequent bathroom breaks, an unlimited supply of bananas, backyard privileges for the most productive monkeys—but nothing worked. The bottom line was that they didn’t care about the project, and no matter how many inspirational speeches I gave, I couldn’t make them care.

Finally, after a couple of weeks, I gave up. Everything they wrote was crap, anyway. The smartest one produced a few good sentences, but he was obviously borrowing stylistic flourishes from James Joyce’s Ulysses, and got offended when I asked him to dumb his work down. “Remember, we’re aiming for a mass-market best-seller here, not great literature,” was all I said, and he started throwing his feces at me. Honestly, if you’re skin is that thin, I told him, you should find another line of work.

Since the experiment was a total failure, I sold eleven of the monkeys to a guy who was starting a fake-news website. He took six of the computers too; the rest I recycled. I kept the smartest monkey as a pet because I felt sorry for him. He clearly has some talent, but his writing is far too experimental and highbrow—not the kind of thing anyone would ever publish. I knew he’d starve out in the real world, so now I feed him in exchange for help on my website and some light editing.

He still throws things at me occasionally, but hey, he’s a monkey. And it’s not like I pay him. The one concession I made, at his request, was to call him an “intern,” rather than “my main monkey.” It was better for his resume, he argued, then he picked a bug out of my hair and ate it.

Perhaps the experiment would have worked better if I had more monkeys, but I don’t see how. Whoever came up with the so-called “million-monkey theorem” obviously had no experience with real monkeys. I wish he had, though, because it would have saved me a lot of money and trouble. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s scientists who publish without doing enough research beforehand.

The Perils of Stalking/Dating/Marrying a Writer

One of the strangest parts about sitting home alone in a crummy room all day stringing sentences together is that when you come out, throngs of women are always waiting outside, intent on ripping your clothes off. If they can’t find your house, they wait outside bookstores for hours before a reading, giggling and screaming, in hopes you’ll be stupid enough to enter through the front door, where they can attack you, pin you to the ground, and yank your hair out by the roots as a souvenir.

Some of these women even fantasize about dating or marrying a writer, and will spend hours at a Starbucks searching for a guy with a laptop who isn’t looking at spreadsheets. If you are one of these women, I urge you to stop now, before you make a mistake you cannot undo. (Note: Many female writers doubtless have the same problem, but I can only speak for one gender of the scribbling classes.)

Now, becoming infatuated with a writer is understandable. The brooding machismo of a man struggling with his inner demons is simply too much for some female psyches to resist. Those who are vulnerable swoon when they see the writer’s sad eyes, and wonder if they might be the one to fill the dark holes in his tattered heart. They imagine what fun it would be to find themselves in bed, after a night of literary abandon, listening to a struggling novelist complain about how little he is appreciated in this culture, where life has become a cesspool of superficial nonsense. Women crave that kind of post-coital pillow talk, and they know it can only come from someone who is living more deeply and intensely than they ever could.

Someone like . . . a writer.

Let me assure you, however, that the reality of sleeping with a writer is much less glamorous than the fantasy. For one thing, writers like to sleep, so all of that late-night chit-chat you’ve been dreaming about has to take place over breakfast, when the groggy-eyed scribe is eating Cheerios, drinking coffee, and otherwise preparing himself for the rigors of the day. Writers do not like to talk during breakfast, so, while their abrupt replies and disinterested grunts may sound like poetry to your ears, they’re really his way of saying, “Don’t you have some more of my writing to read?” The first duty of a writer-stalker, after all, is to read everything the writer they are stalking has ever written. If you haven’t done your homework in this area, that budding relationship you’re imagining is already over.

Not that you should ever pursue an intimate relationship with a writer. And that really is the point I want to get across: Writers do not make good companions. You’d be much better off grabbing one of those spreadsheet guys off the street and molding him into the man-dog you really want: someone who gives you unconditional love, greets you with a smile when you come home, and licks your face like he means it.

When women fantasize about life with a writer, what they’re really infatuated with is the “idea” of life with a writer, not the reality. Writers are famously selfish people who get up every day and do the same thing over and over again, for months on end, sometimes years. There’s nothing remotely interesting about their daily lives, because they live eighty percent of their existence in their imagination, where psychotic literary stalking babes aren’t allowed, unless they are part of a story plot.

Which brings me to the other aspect of dating/stalking/marrying a writer that few women stop to consider. If you get involved in any kind of relationship with a writer, please know going in that he is going to dissect bits and pieces of your personality and attribute them to characters in his stories. This may sound flattering, but writers are assholes, so they don’t use the bits and pieces you want them to use—your engaging intellect, your exquisite taste, your plump lips and sapphire eyes. No, they’re going to use the bits and pieces you’d rather people didn’t know about: your neuroses about spiders, your mental breakdown a few years back, your aversion to public bathrooms, that patch of fungus on your toe, that high-pitched squeal thing that irritates everyone when you laugh. These are the types of things writers fixate on, because they seem so much more true than all the other stuff you’re trying to get them to notice.

If, after reading this, you still want to camp outside a bookstore at three in the morning on the off chance that you’ll attract a writer’s attention, be forewarned that any success you have will inevitably end in disappointment and heartbreak. Only bad writers enter through the front door; the best ones sneak in the back and slither out the same way they came, lest they destroy the illusion of their awesomeness by mingling too closely with their adoring public. These are the nicest writers—the ones who know the dangers, and do what they can to protect writer-loving fans from themselves.

How to Write Best-Selling Fiction in the 21st Century

In the old days, the books that sold best were either biographies of Abraham Lincoln or books about doctors and/or dogs. The joke then was that the best-selling book of all time would be a theoretical tome titled, “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”

Times have changed. The guy who eventually wrote a book called “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog” can’t even get four stars on Amazon.

The lesson here is that 21st-century writers must be much more creative to get people’s attention, especially when it comes to their main characters. A mere doctor will no longer do; he or she must have some other compelling qualities. To sell books in today’s competitive marketplace, a doctor would also have to be a deranged psychopath who harvests the organs of his patients, grounds them up into paint, and uses it to create art that sells for millions. Or she’d have to specialize in a form of healing that attracts only male customers, then suck their blood and send their souls into the fiery pits of hell. And if the doctor has a dog, it had better transform at the full moon into a hairy fanged beast that feeds on the homeless or roams the night inseminating the neighborhood dogs with his demon seed as part of a master plot to vanquish the human race.

Or something along those lines.

The point is, no one wants to read about good people doing good work anymore. They want to read about sick lunatics who do unspeakable things, supernatural creatures who prey on human weakness, psychotic evil-doers who wreak apocalyptic mayhem wherever they go, and beings who have bad skin and look dead—but aren’t!

Teenagers, in other words.

Teenage vampires are all the rage, of course, as are teenage werewolves, zombies, and succubi. For a while there, all you had to do in order to sell a few million copies of a book was fill it with lithe teenage mutants and make them have sex with each other. That’s been done to death, though, in every combination possible, so publishing companies are now worried that their goldmine of deviant teenage sex may be tapped out. To aspiring writers out there, that means opportunity.

The big question no one can answer is: What type of crazed teenage stereotype does the zeitgeist want next?

You could go old school and create a teenage blob that consumes everything in its path, but that already applies to most teenage boys in America. Or you could create a teenager from outer space who is ten times smarter than everyone else—but again, that basically describes every high-achieving teenage girl in the country. You could of course try making these two character types have sex with each other, but does the world really need anymore super-intelligent blob-men? We already have Chris Christie, after all, so maybe we should stop there.

People make fun of Stephanie Meyer, author of the beloved Twilight series, but the truth is, it’s difficult to come up with a plausible teenage monster that people will like. The bigger problem is that teenagers themselves are not very interesting, and turning them into monsters only makes them marginally more interesting. So writers who want to work in this genre have their work cut out for them.

If bloodsucking teenage hooligans aren’t your thing, there’s always the option of inventing a super-smart detective who solves crimes either by his superior powers of deduction, or through the means of special power that allows him or her to apprehend criminals no one else can catch.

All such detectives are based on the great Sherlock Holmes, of course, so be sure to study your Arthur Conan Doyle. And if you feel the need to give your detective a superpower, like the ability to read minds, be careful. On the TV show “The Listener,” for instance, the protagonist’s superpower is an uncanny ability to “hear” the criminal confess what he did and why—a skill that obviously negates the need for any actual detective work. The problem is, this guy can solve just about any crime in minutes, but the show lasts an hour. If you’re the writer, that means you have to fill the other 58 minutes of the show with something else. Snarky detective wise-cracking only goes so far, and the back-story of a mind-reader is usually tragic, especially in relationships, where hiding what you’re really thinking is of paramount importance.

All I’m saying is, if you are a writer who wants to sell a lot of books these days, the competition is stiff. Books about Abraham Lincoln still sell, of course, but they typically require lots of research, and that takes time. It’s much more efficient to sit down, put your thinking cap on, and try to come up with some kind of creepy teen-sex fantasy that no one has tried before.

And just so you know, I’m already working on a novel about a troupe of runaway teenage clowns who suck the happiness out of their audience’s souls and send them back out into the world, empty and hopeless, while they stay back in their tent and have drug-fueled clown orgies. My only concern is that it is too realistic. I’ve raised a teenager, so I know what it’s like. I also know that people don’t want to read about real life—they want to escape into a fictional world where some of those sex-crazed teen psychopaths die. I’m thinking maybe I’ll have a few of my characters contract some sort of sad-clown disease, or have them run into a band of roving gypsies who must sacrifice a clown baby to their god every month to ward off depression.  

I don’t know—I’m still working on it.  Trust me, writing best-selling fiction isn’t as easy as it looks.

The Relationship Between Art and Mental Illness

Today’s topic is a serious one: the relationship between art and mental illness. If you look at history (and I have looked at it more than once), you’ll find that a huge majority of the world’s masterpieces in art, literature, theater, and music were created by people who had some sort of mental illness. An essential part of the creative process, it seems, is losing your marbles, then wasting a few years wondering what marbles are and why it matters whether you can find them again or not.

The question no one asks is, if so many of the world’s great works of art, literature, and music are the by-product of mental illness, why does anyone pay attention to them? Society doesn’t value anything else mentally ill people do, so why should we care about the scrawls and scribbles and squeaks of a bunch of mental misfits?

Once the question is asked, the answer is obvious: We absolutely should NOT care.

After all, isn’t it alarming to think that so much great art has been (and continues to be) created by people who are, to use the clinical term, bat-shit crazy? Furthermore, what does it say about a society when the ravings of a lunatic are preferred over the sensible fact-finding of the local newspaper? How did it come to pass that the straightforward prose of a plumber’s manual is viewed as inferior to the addled ramblings of a schizophrenic poet? And why does a self-mutilating depressive like Vincent Van Gogh get so much attention when my Aunt Charlotte—as cheerful and amiable a doodler of flowers as there ever was—can’t even get gallery owners to return her phone calls?

Once the veil is lifted, it’s impossible not to see how society is being corrupted and poisoned by the mentally ill. Museums and bookstores everywhere are filled with the by-products of their diseased brainpans. This means that millions of people each year are exposed to mental illness, and, because mental illness can be contagious, many of these people become mentally ill themselves.

The signs of mental-illness exposure are everywhere, if you know what to look for: People who have a sudden appreciation for the “beauty” of the natural world; children who start asking questions about “racial equality” and “fairness”; people who are insufferably tolerant of other people’s religious practices and beliefs; a spontaneous interest in alternative “perspectives”; a bizarre level of empathy for people one doesn’t personally know; adults who don’t follow professional sports; sudden cravings for non-American food; a desire to attend gallery openings and art fairs; believing that public sculptures foster “community,” “respect,” and “understanding”; people who sing on the bus; the wearing of wacky outfits for no practical reason; laughing at irony; decorating one's desk space to make it look more "creative"; quitting a job to go do something more "meaningful"; getting a tattoo. The list goes on. 

The point is, this whole disgusting mess is the result of people being unwittingly exposed to mental illness through the irresponsible distribution of art, literature, and music in our society, particularly in our museums and schools. Clearly, something must be done.

That’s why I am drafting a Congressional proposal to have all the artwork in the nation’s museums removed and re-evaluated for indications of mental illness. I am also proposing that all the books in our public libraries be re-catalogued according to the mental stability of their authors, and all the music polluting our nation’s airwaves and Internet streams silenced until the mental fitness of all the musicians involved can be evaluated, and every one of them tested for consumption of illegal drugs, subversive literature, or any other form of mental contraband.

It may take some time, but cleansing the nation of this plague is essential if we want to live in a saner, more reasonable world. Please, join me in the fight to restore mental health as the cornerstone of American democracy.

Vote Trump in 2016!

Ignore Us Geniuses at Your Peril

One of the burdens of genius is finding tactful ways to let other people know that their ideas and opinions are complete bullshit.

This is difficult for two reasons. First, true geniuses are often misunderstood, so they must speak with a clarity and precision that most people find irritating. And two, most people cannot smell the stink of their own mental sewage, so they would rather breathe their own fetid fumes than step up to the oxygen bar of genius and take a big, purifying whiff of truth.

I have been a genius my entire life, so I can personally attest to the fact that it is no fun to be shunned, like Galileo, by your fellow man, or dismissed as a crank, like Charles Manson, or told, by your psychiatrist, that you should just shut up and take your medication before the demons come back.

From where I sit, on my mental mountaintop, it looks like as if the entire world is trapped in a kind of Stockholm syndrome of stupidity. Held captive by multinational media conglomerates, fed a steady diet of mediocrity, and beaten into submission by constant viewing, night after night, of American Ninja Warrior and the X Factor, the American public has come to identify with its abusers and, as a survival tactic, flips meekly through the Netflix catalogue in search of one more series it can binge-watch before having to return to the entertainment hell of network television.

I have been warning people of this intellectual apocalypse for some time, of course, and have written extensively about the dangers of not reading what I write. But, because I have been categorized as a “genius,” people tend to ignore my warnings and go on with their lives as if nothing is wrong.

On those occasions when I have taken to the street with my message, abandoning the confines of the printed page for the freedom of the public square, the crowds have been receptive. However, mothers with small children, no doubt afraid that my message will have undue influence on their wee ones, often cross to the other side of the street when they see me. Which is a pity, because altering the minds of the young is the first step toward altering the mind of society, which is the first step toward getting people to appreciate how I saw all of this coming but no one listened, and to understand that when the shit hits the fan, don’t come running to me, because it’ll be too late. I’ll be in the Caribbean by then, sipping rum punches and watching the apocalypse from a beach chair in the Bahamas.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that the burden of being right all the time is a heavy one. It is a burden geniuses carry, largely unnoticed and unrecognized, so that other people can live their pathetic lives, unencumbered by the weight and gravity of inconvenient truths. Ignore us if you dare—hey, it’s a free country (for now). But when things really go off the rails—when, say, Donald Trump is elected president, or The Dome comes back for a fourth season, or it turns out that gluten is good for you after all—don’t come running to us.

We’re outta here.

How to Look as Smart as a Writer

Many ordinary people want to know why writers look so intelligent. On their book covers, writers look amazingly intense and focused, as if their brains are doing all kinds of smart, insightful things while they’re staring into the camera. It’s as if, as soon as the camera shutter clicks, the writer is going to grab a piece of paper and scribble down a few lines of inspired brilliance, such as “get bananas and milk,” or “plant azaleas.” And when the average person meets a writer at a party, they are often overwhelmed by the aura of intelligence writers project. It’s like a smell (and, to be fair, sometimes it is a smell) that envelops the writer and says to everyone at the party, “I am the smartest person in the room.”

What many regular people want to know is how they can project that kind of intellectual confidence without actually having to write anything. Because let’s face it, agonizing over ideas, characters, sentence constructions and page numbers is not everyone’s cup of tea. Which is why I’m here to help.

There are several tricks and shortcuts stupid people can use to appear more intelligent. For instance, if someone approaches you at a party and says something intelligent-sounding like, “They’re running low on beer,” all you have to do in order to appear even more intelligent is say, “ARE they?”

The reason this sounds so smart is that it implies you know something the other person doesn’t—like where the rest of the beer is. But it also lets the other person know that you’re not going to give up that information easily, because frankly, you think he is an idiot for thinking that the beer supply is actually running low. Heck, it’s only nine o’clock. Stunned by your apparent omniscience, and wracked with insecurity over his own inability to locate the extra beer stash, this poor sap will scurry away in search of more lager, convinced that you are wiser and smarter than he will ever be.

What stupid people need to understand is that smart people, as a rule, never answer questions. Rather, they get people to answer their own questions. If you were a writer and someone asked you, “What color is Donald Trump’s hair?,” you would not say, “Charismatic Phlegm.” Instead, you would say, “Interesting question. What color would you say it is?”

Note that all you’ve really done is ask the person’s question back at them. The reason this works so well is that most people would rather answer their own questions anyway. As a rule, people don’t really want to know what you think; they want you to know what they think. Giving them the chance to tell you is the intelligent person’s way of saying, “That’s such a stupid question, I’m going to let you answer it.”

On those rare occasions when a writer is faced with a question they don’t know the answer to, their fail-safe phrase is, “It depends.” This works in all kinds of situations because it suggests that there are complexities to the question that no one else has considered. If you, as a stupid person, don’t actually know what those complexities are, you can follow up any “it depends” with the phrase, “but I don’t have to tell you that!” This makes the other person think they should already know what you’re talking about. Few people are smart enough to admit when they don’t know something, so invoking a well-timed “it depends” is a safe bet in most crowds.

Back in the day, all a person had to do in order to appear more intelligent was wear a pair of glasses. But now, even stupid people wear glasses, so other tactics must be employed. Practice the strategies I’ve explained above and people will immediately start suspecting that you are smarter than you appear.

They may even mistake you for a writer.

Artist Dilemma #24: The Curse of Creativity

People who do not use their imagination for a living often wonder what the “creative urge” feels like, and how creative people harness it. They also wonder why creative people even bother, when so much more money can be made doing just about anything else. There is a paradox here, one that causes creative people to think, “Why the hell am I doing this?” and non-creative people to wonder, “Why don’t those idiots just join a brokerage firm?”

The confusion is understandable. If you compare the average income of an investment banker to that of an artist, it’s clear that society values the activities of the investment banker over the artist by a factor of about 100,000 to 1. That means that every time an investment banker twitches his finger over a computer keyboard, it’s 100,000 times more valuable to culture and civilization than anything an artist does with their hands. By comparison, the value of an artist’s contribution to society is so miniscule that it’s basically meaningless.

Which leads us to the mysteries of the “creative urge.” Why create anything, after all, when you can be contributing to the social good by accumulating mountains of glorious cash?

Since they don’t have enough imagination to fathom an answer to this question, non-creative people have invented a bizarre mythology about the rewards of creativity. To wit: They believe that creating something—anything—must be so satisfying to the human soul—indeed so much fun—that people are willing to sacrifice the joys of money-making in order to experience it. Even more bizarre, non-creative people often convince themselves that creative people lead more “meaningful” lives because they are doing what they are “meant” to do, rather than suffering the dull drudgery of ridiculous wealth. At parties, after a few drinks, non-creatives can even be heard bemoaning their massive fortunes and wondering what their lives might have been like if they just had the courage to abandon the needs of society and follow their “bliss,” rather than commit their lives to the greater economic good. Just once in their lives they would like to feel “inspired” to do something artistic, they think, rather than sneer at it because the value proposition is so absurd.

It’s a sad spectacle—and a totally unnecessary one. Because if a fabulously wealthy non-creative person ever actually felt the “urge” to create something, they would be even more mystified than they already are.  

What non-creative people don’t understand is that artists don’t harness the urge to create—it harnesses them. It grabs the artist, binds their legs and hands, then snakes its way up around their throat and chokes them until they agree to its insane demands. There is terror involved, along with an involuntary loosening of the bowels and frequent cries for mercy. There is nothing fun about it. There is only the sickening realization that if you do not comply, if you struggle and fight—by becoming a lawyer, say, or graphic designer—you will doom yourself to a hellish purgatory of middle-class stability. Those who win the fight go on to drive Jettas and coach their child’s soccer team. Those who don’t make up a song, paint a picture, write a poem, put on a play, or otherwise waste their time, knowing full well that what they are doing has no social value whatsoever.

In their heart of hearts, of course, creative people wish they could make a more meaningful, seven-figure contribution to society. But they can’t, because the demon “urge” has them by the neck and will not let go. There is nothing enviable or romantic about it. Creativity is like cancer—if it infects you, you must deal with it, whether you want to or not, and it doesn’t really give a shit if you die in the process.

But try you must, because there is nothing else to do, since fate has not given you a choice. If it had, you would of course chosen a more socially productive path. But it didn’t, so you must resign yourself to the fact that you will never contribute as much to society as the world’s bankers, brokers, and venture capitalists. Compared to them, you are just a blood-sucking cultural parasite. But that’s okay. Maybe in your next life you’ll be lucky enough to have a private jet and a super-PAC, and do something with your life that has a quantifiable purpose and value.

In the meantime, you are cursed with the urge, and there is nothing else to do but create something, whether you want to or not.