With all due respect to Hemingway, life is an experience not an action. The people who try the hardest to choke out every last opportunity that life has to offer are usually the ones that look back and realize that they have wasted the most. Writing is the same way. I think that every creative writer begins writing just because it makes him/her feel good. That can get lost along the way somewhere. Especially after some success, because then writing can mean respect and validity and money, which are all good things to have but not good reasons for writing anything. No, the only good reason for writing is because doing it makes you feel good. At the end of the day we are nothing but glorified junkies. It’s pretty great though if you think about it. Someone who’s good at being a smack addict has nothing to look forward to but bad teeth, interventions, and the shakes. But a good writer might just be able to spin it into a little respect, a little sex, and maybe even a little money. Perhaps not very much, but the pay is pretty good considering it’s something you would do for free. All things considered, we’re lucky, as far as addictions go. Readers are addicts to. Only they can’t grow their own drugs, so they need us. We need them to I guess, so we feel like we’re doing something positive for the world and not just masturbating with vowels.

I guess this is just a long way of saying don’t worry about form (there will be plenty of critics to worry about form after you’ve written something) and don’t worry about life it will take care of itself. Just write. Write whatever makes you feel good, and fuck the rest. We’re all addicts. And you don’t need to try and capture the wind in your hands when you begin a new project, you just have to take another hit and keep hitting untill you cop them buzz that made you become a writer in the first place. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to go your whole life without sobering up, and when you die someone will find you slumped over in an armchair, with a half finished manuscript strewn across the floor and an empty pen still protruding from one arm.