There are few things that I find more boring than writers writing about writing.* Say what you will, but I’m of the opinion that there aren’t a shitload of scribes who have earned their place in the canon to write about the craft itself and as far as I’ve searched, they’re not writing about it on Medium.

Take Stephen King. The only parts of On Writing I remember are bits about a sick kid, an industrial laundromat, the Carrie manuscript and copious amounts of cocaine. Suffice it to say, whatever lesson about writing I thought was important to remember didn’t keep as well as the juicier parts about his life because books like On Writing are memoirs and should be read as such.

What I’m talking about are the essays on process and purview and the sweaty, fish out of water trope that some writers use when they’d do better to drink a juice, take a nap and give it a go later. You know the kind; they’re essays the equivalent to sitting around drinking coffee and talking about what Stephen King is talking about when he’s writing about writing which is not the fucking point of On Writing anyway. The point is to motivate you to write about anything but writing, if in fact you find yourself sick enough to want to pursue the activity, predisposed to addiction or not.

But as far I as can tell, there aren’t a lot of Stephen Kings on Medium; if you were, you wouldn’t be boring your audience with essays you think they want to read. You’d be sharing something about yourself, fact or fiction. Either would be better than writing about writing.

What follows are things to avoid if you feel you must resort to writing about writing.

Whatever you do, don’t write about the “process.”

In fact, don’t fucking call it the process. This shit isn’t a mystery; it’s discipline. You want my process? Here you go, have at it:

· Drink one cup of coffee. Pour a second cup of coffee. Put on pants. Sit at my desk and do light internet research. Take a shitload of notes in a discount leather sketchbook. Overcome urge to Facebook hate-stalk.

· Think about what to have for lunch. Think about masturbating. Dump cold leftover coffee into lidless plastic to-go cup. Go to the gym. Run until I feel nothing.

· Go to the mall to contemplate American ruin. Sit in the food court to take notes. Eat nothing. Become overwhelmed by people’s poor eating habits. Go to the Gap. Leave with another chambray button down. Feel brief sense of accomplishment for receiving a 40% discount on an already sale priced item I currently have in my closet.

· Get my nails done. Lose myself in thought as a smiling Vietnamese woman wearing a paper mask covers my fingertips in acetone and foil. Smile back to prevent me from thinking about how I might be poisoning myself. Choose whichever color makes me feel most rich.

· Forget to eat lunch. Snack on organic, gluten-free, farm fresh, naturally flavored artisanal bullshit oat bar while sitting in traffic. Hate myself for succumbing to an elitist lifestyle. Look out the car window. Hate myself less for not being the person in the car next to me inhaling a Big Mac.

· Return home. Bitch about my day to my long-suffering boyfriend. Eat dinner. Return to my desk. Write until I’m too tired to have a panic attack.

It’s true; a lot of writing happens when you’re not writing, but unless you put your ass in the chair, it doesn’t matter and if you’re willing to sit, I’ll take a story about the nail salon over anything anyone could ever say about writing.

Avoid aspirational navel-gazing.

The only thing worse than writing about writing is writing about having nothing to write about. I call this aspirational navel-gazing and it’s usually a good indicator for letting your audience know that you’re either bored or lazy.

John Waters once wrote “We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” These days, a heavily used library card and a fully stocked Kindle might just as well do the trick, but the same logic can be applied for sleeping with anyone who says they’re a writer.

Before you have sex with them, ask them for a sample. If their latest Medium post is about writing, don’t fuck them because that’s lazy writing and if you don’t have the discipline to learn to use your imagination, then I doubt you have what it takes to be good at giving head.

Use your low self-esteem to your advantage.

Writers writing about being embarrassed about being a writer. Where do I start?

Grow up, take a seat at the table, lean the fuck in and be proud of what you do. Spending an inordinate amount of time alone in your imagination is a fucking brave thing to do and something most wouldn’t dare try.

Note: If you hold yourself in such low esteem, use that as a jumping off point. An unhealthy self-image can be one of your most valuable assets when it comes to writing stories that resonate with the people who live outside of your bellybutton.

You don’t often read about painters writing about the process of painting or doctors writing about the embarrassment of doctoring, right? For the most part, what any of us do for our day job isn’t interesting enough to be recorded.

Melville’s Moby-Dick contains hundreds of dull-ass, dryly written pages on ship parts, whale books and the minutiae of whaling. When I come upon an essay about a writer writing about writing on Medium, I abandon ship faster than I should have Moby-Dick. Why? Because there are other writers to read. Writing is a matter of doing and I’d rather read the writers who explore things we cannot see, who endeavor to find something new, who chase the fucking whale and live to write about it.

*Full disclosure: When I was 22, I wrote about writing and was fortunate enough to be in a creative writing class where my peers who had the courage of their convictions to tell me it was boring as fuck. Thank you.