WORDS | Wisdom of Charles Bukowski

I knew (with a mixture of hope, fear and dread) that my need to write would not disappear forever if, in fact, I was meant to be a writer.

It turns out, when I took more than a decade off to focus first on a demanding career and then another decade and more devoted to the demands of child-rearing, I couldn’t string two storytelling words together. I felt I had failed my children. I had failed myself! When I was a kid who babysat every other kid in the neighbourhood, I was great at making up stories about knights, dragons, and fiery damsels who would protect their men and pets. I never wrote anything down. With the naïve enthusiasm of youth, I knew I’d remember all of those stories when I had kids of my own. And then I couldn’t remember anything!

Now I am able to focus my creative energy on things other than bottles, diapers, homework, never-ending appointments, sporting events and contagious kid-spreading germs. I am fully engaged in recapturing my imagination and the concept of suspending belief to hone my skills as a writer, more specifically, a storyteller. I have oodles of books. I attend plenty of classes. I practice writing regularly. Of particular enjoyment are Brian Henry’s weekend workshops where I’ve enjoyed the adult-friendly version of Writer’s Craft.

I knew my deep yet denied need to write was returning as an integral part of my life when I read Charles Bukowski’s poem:

 

So You Want to Be a Writer
By Charles Bukowski

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

I needed proof. I got it. Thanks, Chuck!

And, thanks Brian for publishing my first public work: The Home Key. I am now surrounded by all kinds of ideas, notes, beginnings, middles and ends. Asked an unasked, they litter my desk and my mind. I cannot wait to get more on paper, submitted and published!