Most people are bloody awful at writing, so if you simply write the way you were born to write, you will nearly always be the best writer in the room. But that is a very low bar, and you will never get any better if you are satisfied with simply being the best writer amongst your small circle of friends. The only way to get really good at writing is to write a whole heck of a lot and read even more. Don’t be that guy who fancies himself a poet, the guy who idly flips through a dog-eared book of Bukowski poems in the coffeehouse across the street from the community college where he took a class once, the guy who thinks everything he’s ever scrawled in his notebook and monotoned at an open mic poetry reading is brilliant, the guy who tells people he’s working on the great American novel but who really works at Panera Bread during the day and plays video games in his mom’s basement at night, the guy who only takes a creative writing class between girlfriends so he can woo some unsuspecting poet girl with his well-rehearsed bullshit. Yeah, kid… don’t grow up to be that. Just write and write and read and read and keep doing it your whole life whether you get famous or not. Do it like you breathe.
My Side of the Mountain by Jean George. It’s about a city kid who runs away from home to live in the woods. He raises a baby peregrine falcon named Frightful that he teaches to hunt for him, and he befriends a ferret and a raccoon and maybe a fox, I can’t remember, but he lives in a hollowed-out tree and learns how to steal deer from hunters and make deer jerky and skin the deer and tan the hide and chew on it until it gets soft enough to make his own clothes. It’s a lovely escapist fantasy with hand-drawn maps of his campsite. The kid’s name is Sam Gribley, and I’ve used the name as a pseudonym countless times. When I grew, my dad was in the navy, so we moved a lot. Every time I started over again at a new school, I would race to the library and check this book out on the first day and re-read it. It was my ritual. A friend who was always waiting for me at the next school and the next. It made me feel not so alone.
Here is wisdom: You don’t find gold by simply tapping a shovel on the ground and hearing a loud DINK. First, you gotta dig a mountain of earth with exactly zero gold in it before you find even the thinnest flake of gold, and you have to keep doing that and keep looking for those tiny slivers of gold until finally you have enough to melt into a shiny gold ring. Another way of putting that is this: You have to write reams and reams of absolute garbage to get that one useful turn of phrase, then you have to work it and mold it and shape it and put it to the side while you write and write more absolute garbage. Every masterpiece sits atop a Mount Everest-sized pile of failure, and you will never get to that peak unless you are willing to fail and fail and fail and keep on failing failing failing. If you are too afraid of failure to fail on a daily basis, you will never learn a goddamned thing.
I would write no matter what, whether I washed cars for a living or was a camgirl on OnlyFans or robbed banks or baked cookies or dug ditches or slang espressos or slept on park benches wrapped in newspaper. I don’t write for work; I write for a living.
Big Poppa E is a three-time veteran of HBO’s “Def Poetry” series and is a National Poetry Slam Champion. He has performed his engaging mix of stand-up comedy, dramatic monologue, and performance poetry at more than 100 universities and high schools plus countless bars, coffeehouses, art galleries, and black box theaters across 45 states. He has had his poetry quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers magazine, The Ottawa Citizen (Canada), The Daily Express (England), and The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). He has appeared on the comedy-variety show “The Way We Do It” on BET, “60 Minutes” on CBS, and Voice of America.
