Write For Someone
Just write cool shit.
How simple is that?
People on the internet spend hundreds or thousands of dollars per year taking writing classes or listening to some booktuber or booktok influencer who promises hacks (ironic use?) to becoming a successful author. Substack itself, which I use for this newsletter, is lousy with writing advice that follows the growth mindset.
While I think it’s important to listen to your audience and write for an audience, I do think most of this advice you find online is a way for you to become a very boring artist. Sure, you might find success doing it, but I can’t imagine enjoying the work of following some formula made by some random person online. Someone who, by the way, probably does not have a track record of success in whatever genre you’re going to write in.
My advice for writers is twofold:
First, follow your obsessions. Whatever makes you the strange little freak you are is going to animate your fiction and give it a flavor unlike anyone else. James Joyce, for example, was obsessed with language, and especially the English language, and he used this to transform Homer’s The Odyssey. At the most basic level, rewriting the Odyssey in a modern setting doesn’t sound that innovative, and yet Joyce bringing his little freak self to the idea led to one of the wildest books ever to be published.
Second, write for a specific person. Not yourself, mind. When you set out to write a novel, write it for a single person. Maybe your mom or your son or your friend. Doesn’t matter who but make it for someone. This will help you with motivation but will also give you a framework for the entire novel. And since the universal is in the specific, you’ll find that a lot of someone’s like exactly what you thought your intended audience would love.
And this isn’t really different from what
is saying in her piece above.Just write cool shit and write it for someone who will love it.
This was the impetus behind my novel Howl. I wanted to write
’s new favorite book, the one he didn’t know could exist. And so I just dove in without a plan and with only a single goal: make him love this book.I like to think this is what I’ve been doing since I abandoned social media ten years ago. Part of what got me over myself as a writer was the death of a dear friend, my old roommate when we were 24/25. I wrote a book that I thought would make him laugh. I wrote it for him. Filled it with cool shit to delight him and only him.
Since then, I’ve written a lot of novels, only returning to social media primarily through this newsletter to start sharing all the cool shit I’ve been tinkering around with alone.
When I was still heavily involved in the literary scene, I had fallen into a trap of trying to please a scene, writing books that might impress that scene.
This is a terrible way to write. Not because you’ll produce bad books—though you might—but because it is genuinely dissatisfying work.
And you should enjoy writing. If you don’t enjoy the work, go do anything else. I’m begging you, really. There are already too many writers. No one will miss you if you don’t love this.
But this desire to write cool shit led to a very peculiar little novel called The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker.
I wrote this the same month as Glossolalia, which was another product of me just trying to write something truly unique and weird and wonderful, something that my singular audience had always hoped for.
Horus & Motherfucker is a very different piece, owing much to the Sword & Sorcery genre.
But the work underlying this novel was the knowledge that no one would ever see this weird little monster, this rabid raging storm of a novel. I had only abandoned the internet a few months previously and the amount of freedom I felt was indescribable, which led to an immense amount of creative work.
At the time, my friend and cohost Kyle Muntz was staying at my house. I handed him Glossolalia and Horus & Motherfucker mostly out of curiosity. Unsurprisingly, he loved Glossolalia, though he was surprised by the directions it went. But then he came to Horus & Motherfucker and was, I think, genuinely shocked by it.
He told me it was unpublishable. Too weird. Too gross. Too violent. Too dark. Too much cannibalism. Too many jokes.
And so I set it aside for many years. It was resurrected by David Simmons who found it in my pile of manuscripts that I shared with the
.He read it twice.
He loved it.
Told me so. Even asked me questions about this and that, the world I’d built so long ago, the theologies, and the strange journey of these escaped slaves. It had been so long that I couldn’t answer his questions, and so I picked it up to read it again.
And, nearly ten years after writing it, I was able to see it with new eyes. With clear eyes.
With the eyes of a fan.
This bastard child of a novel was, perhaps, too weird and wild and rabid, but it was also the kind of novel I wanted to exist. Full of my own weird obsessions and quirks, carrying the weight of many of my fears, the terrors that animate my fiction, but also this buoyant sense of freedom, of limitless possibility.
Even so, it took me several years to finally decide to release it. It took
’s brilliant cover art and Tony Tran’s feral illustrations to bring it to life in ways that I could only ever dream of.Which is what I’m doing next week via Kickstarter.
I am very much hoping for a successful launch and to help me get there, I’d very much appreciate if you followed this link to the Launching Soon page and clicking on that Notify me at launch button. And then, of course, when the funding campaign goes live, my infinite gratitude will go to those who order this book.
If we meet some of the Stretch Goals, there will even be some nice ways to beautify the hardcover edition, which I’m very excited and hopeful for.
Now, why Kickstarter and not directly through Amazon or a publisher?
Well, this isn’t exactly the kind of title that fits comfortably on online or in person retailers. Most bookstores would prefer for motherfucker to not be in the title of the books on their shelves. And so Kickstarter seemed like the right path, at least for this novel.
A book too weird and violent, too feral and dark, with illustrations by Tony Tran, introduction by David Simmons, and a cover by Kelby Losack. It’ll be printed locally here in Minnesota and, sadly, only available in the US and Canada. After the campaign, I’ll be happy to sort out international shipping.
I hope you join me next week to make this a successful campaign.
Free books:
That is a sweet ass cover.
THIS! THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS! Is all I aspire to. To fucking write stories I fucking love. With cool shit.