Writer’s Update: Great Advice From Charles Bukowski

Having completed two books now, with several more fairly close to completion (see here for more detail), I’ve been flitting around each of them for the past two months, trying to decide (alongside fervent prayer, of course) which one I should focus on next. It’s fair to say, the work on these books isn’t coming as easy as it did on the first two – the well of passion has dried up slightly on one or two of them.

And then, today, I stumbled upon this great poem by Charles Bukowski, called So You Want To Be A Writer – and I found he gets it just right, as he alerted in me a salutary reminder of how working on a book should feel. When you’re hot on topic, the creativity (either writing or editing) is flowing out, and you’re producing the best stuff that’s inside you; you’ll feel it “come bursting out of you, it’ll be “unasked out of your heart”, and it will “come out of your soul like a rocket” where the “sun inside you is burning your gut”.

Yes, that’s how you know what you should be prioritising – a really timely reminder as I press forward and try to find more of the sun inside me.

Here is the poem in full (in its original format). Hope it helps, fellow writers:

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.

The Transmania Effect

 

In a paper just released, called Supporting transgender young people in schools: guidance for Scottish schools - teachers are being told some pretty disturbing things. Although it doesn't say so explicitly, if you read between the lines, you can see in the report that teachers are being instructed to unquestioningly affirm the trans identities of young children, even withholding the information from the child's family if they see fit to do so.

Alas, this is a trend that is all too familiar to us. Just the other day I was with a couple who, without batting an eyelid, casually announced that one of the kids in their daughter’s primary school had declared he was born a boy but now wants to be a girl. The way that much of the development of sex and the associative gender identity has gone on to produce the trends we are seeing at the moment is, I think, quite startling, and I believe we should try to put the brakes on this vehicle, and look for a more balanced perspective.  

This tendency is part of a phenomenon in society for which we perhaps need a catchy name. It’s one we all recognise; the one where we take a very extreme case that occurs infrequently in society and make it into a mainstream issue that grossly exaggerates its utility and its reality. It’s true that very occasionally too little or too much of the male or female sex hormone can affect the development of reproductive organs, making sex a fuzzier category of definition. I don’t doubt that this is a difficult condition into which one can be born, where too much oestrogen or testosterone has been exposed to a foetus in-utero, or when mutations trigger the wrong amount of a sex hormone being produced. But in the vast majority of cases concerning everyone who has ever lived, the sex of a person is clearly and comprehensively demarcated, and most people haven’t the slightest trouble living and identifying as a man or as a woman.

Now of course we should listen to our children and try to help them manage the feelings they believe they might be having in what must be a wildly confusing society for them. But we should help them make sense of the world by teaching them about truths and facts, so that they can develop a proper balanced conception of the world. Because I can assure you that many people are using this issue interchangeably and mischievously for their convenience.

When you have scores of young children saying they have been 'born in the wrong body' or that they are non-binary, it’s a sign that society has gone too far in one direction – especially as a coherent conception of sex and gender does not manifest in young children (they don’t have the sophisticated cognitive apparatus to distinguish - for example, sometimes young children can confuse a boy or girl purely on whether or not they are wearing a dress).

Moreover, there is also the very well-established paradox at the heart of this conflict: that if gender is a social construct and we allow people to pick and choose their gender (gender-fluidity), that smacks in the face of the idea of immutable gender, which many are claiming as an inalienable privilege. Most people caught up in this perceived social cause are trying to have it both ways. The facts do not allow for this contradiction. The reality is, integration of the sex developmental processes with environmental development gives rise to an individual’s unique personality and preferences. And sex-related differences occur largely independently of socio-cultural influences. In fact, when socio-cultural influences diminish in occurrence with greater expression of males and females, the differences between males and females in terms of preferences become more pronounced not less.

Furthermore, there are many traits that overlap between the sexes, which means females can show up as extreme in more masculine categories, and males can show up as extreme in more feminine categories. In other words, in some traits, females can appear more male than males, and males can appear more female than females. It is folly to mechanically confuse masculine and feminine outliers with gender dysphoria or intersexuality. The vast majority of people who have atypical personality profiles are still within the natural distribution of male and female identities – they are not ‘born in the wrong body’. In most cases, what is perceived as “gender identity” is part of their personality profile from within a sex category, usually related to masculinity and femininity, but confused with one’s sex.

This is especially relevant in these attributed issues in younger people. What begins as perceived lack of congruity between a person’s biological sex and their gender presentation usually gets washed out in maturity, where one becomes clear about one’s sex and identity. There is widespread confusion about the distribution of sex-related personality and behavioural distinctions, and this is creating a crisis of irresponsible teaching. Young children shouldn’t be telling us they have been born in the wrong body - but when this happens they should be carefully nurtured towards more facts and greater wisdom, and given time to grow and develop. The trend towards alarmism, pandering to their whims, and worse, irreversible and harmful medical and surgical interventions are a damaging development that needs urgently addressing.