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.