Start Writing Today: A Funny Guide for Beginners

Don’t compare your first draft to Kafka. He didn’t want you to read his either.

Photo Credit: Thought Catalog via Unsplash

Before the First Sentence: What You Write Is… Basically Poop

Let’s just say it:
Your first written work — your masterpiece, your magnum-ish opus, your artistic explosion — is, psychoanalytically speaking… excrement.

This isn’t an insult. It’s Freudian theory.

The first thing you created was raw, embarrassing and important to you: your poo. Like a proud toddler, you expect the world to say: ‘Oh wow! That’s magnificent!’

But that’s the point. You must create the early mess before anything beautiful can come through.

No one skips this stage. Kafka didn’t. Virginia Woolf didn’t. Even Dostoyevski probably wrote a silly joke and hoped no one would find it.

So here’s the rule: poop first, polish later.

Please Stop Comparing Yourself to Dead Geniuses

Reading Dostoyevsky while drafting your first story is like comparing your apartment kitchen to a five-star restaurant. Of course it doesn’t measure up. One has a literary empire. The other has one functioning spoon.

Don’t compare your first manuscript to Kafka’s. Did you also know that Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn his work? Yet here we are, quoting him. What was he thinking when he gave his work to Max Brod? What was Max Brod thinking? Was it a good idea? Fortunately, that’s not the case this time. All of Kafka’s books are being turned into five-part articles on Medium, and subscribers will receive weekly newsletters from Kafka. I wouldn’t want an email from Kafka every week.

The Tragic Comedy of Starting

I once collected fragments I wrote in a box, convinced I was writing something profound. Over time, the box weighed 8 kilos, which is heavier than my emotional resilience in most relationships. I hoped someone would discover it posthumously and whisper, ‘She was brilliant, just misunderstood.’ Instead, they’d likely say, ‘She really liked parentheses.’

Writing Is a Messy Relationship

Writing isn’t about creating clean, sparkling sentences that make your English teacher weep with joy. It’s about yelling into the void and hoping the void yells back something like, ‘That comma... Bold choice. ’

I don’t write because I have something perfect to say. I write because I have something loud to say.

Congratulations, Now You Are a Writer

No one’s going to show up with a certificate and a balloon in your bedroom saying, ‘You did it! You’re a real writer now!’

You’ll spend years writing into a screen that doesn’t clap.

But still, we write. Because the desire to write burns inside us.

It’s better than yelling at strangers on the bus.

Because even when no one sees your writing, it makes you feel slightly more alive than taxes do.