How Not to Hate Your Writing

First, try to hate something, anything, else. Your sister perhaps, her myopia, the kids she shows off via Instagram to prove her viability (this is what creation really looks like, she doesn’t have to say).

Or hate the earnest grocery cashier who asks nightly during your Rex Goliath pinot purchase if she can see your identification. Not I.D.: identification. Who doesn’t smile back when you suggest she’s probably memorized your height and weight by now. Who makes you wonder if you can’t say anything right, how you are ever going to write anything right.

Run them off a cliff together, Thelma-and-Louise style, in your story in search of an ending. Hate them with every clip of your typing fingertips. Hate them with the scorching of a thousand venereal diseases.

Once you’re piping hot, level out your hatred. Hate them with the scorching of only a handful of venereal diseases.

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Understand time’s power to stale. See your writing as a slice of Wonder Bread. The day you purchase (write) it, you’ll be excited to eat (read) it, but in a few days you’ll see how what you thought was good bread doesn’t last. Next month you won’t remember what brand you bought, and in six it will be unrecognizable. No amount of hunger could induce you to reopen it.

So butter your writing with care. Wait till the butter is a little soft and the bread a little toasted, so that it will spread easily. Time is the butter. Your desire to not hate your own writing is your mouth, chewing.

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Acknowledge bad metaphors. Tell yourself that staying hungry is among the most important of the bad ones, because it’s true. If someone advises this, don’t think back to the stale Wonder Bread. Just eat the cupcake or whatever and for those few seconds the bad metaphors will disappear.

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Your sister will not want to read your work, or maybe your father won’t. This will help. You’ll know that before you even ask them to because a writing professor will have warned you by saying, “The world isn’t asking to read your work; indeed, it may often ask whether or not it needs more writers.”

Think the sentence, “Only dicks speak in semicolons.”

Write the sentence, “Professor X has a fuck-ton of bad poetry hidden in a dusty box inside a moldy drawer, and he has the charm of so many buttholes.” Love that sentence, hate the suckitude of the professor (but love the professor deep down, because you are magnanimous).

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Write a sentence which includes the phrase “like so many” and then vow to never write those three words in succession ever again.

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Sing a few of your hated lines of writing to the beat of Beyonce’s “Halo.” Or Peter Cetera’s “The Glory of Love.” YouTube the videos for both if, in addition to avoiding hating your writing, you’d like to understand less about what it means to sing — or write — about love.

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Write a shallow imitation of one of your favorite writers. Do not acknowledge this anywhere in your piece and see if readers will notice it. Include your favorite writer’s name as a header and then erase it. Next, type your own name in the most professional font and size, print it, and paste it to the copy of your favorite book by your favorite writer. These two unrelated activities will be so exhausting that now you will be too tired to hate your own writing.

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Logon to your favorite social networking site and note the writing that is so much easier to hate than your own. See your writer friends posting quippy updates? They are trying really hard to do that, and want your approval. Honor the most desperate one with a Like or Heart, but give even more love to non-writer high school friends who hourly post sentences such as the following: “Ges what immmmm doinggggg?!!!”

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Create your own like. It might look like this: Like. This is the equivalent of having your colors done. The change of hues will be so surprising you’ll be reading and go all, “Oh who’s this sexy motherfucker?” before you even realize it is your writing. See how nice?

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Read the Drudge Report. Or whatever it is Alex Jones “writes.” Hate that shit instead.

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Jot down your next story idea longhand, only use your opposing hand, and preferably after ingesting the bottle of wine for which grocery store identification was required. This text cannot be hateful, because it will be incomprehensible. Thus, erudite. Thus, you are brilliant.

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Suspect your writing of having an affair with your best friend. Leave your friend a vague message: I know what you’re trying to do to us, and then silence your phone.

Win your writing back. Print out every page you’ve written in the past six months and line your bed with it. Light some candles. See what happens.

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Try not to hate anything too much or risk becoming a major bitch and an unsuccessful writer. (Ideally, in your quest to not hate your writing, you want those last two adjectives reversed.)