Writer

The day you become a writer is the day someone tells you that you can’t. They tell you that you can’t while you’re famished and you don’t have enough money to see you through the rest of the month but you know that you have to become a writer. The day you remember you’re a writer is the day that you’re on your knees and locked away from the world you once knew, and the only thing you can think about is finding someone that will listen to the thoughts in your head without telling you to shut up - even if that someone is a blank screen. The day you become a writer is the day you discover that you never feel truly alive until you find the words to describe why your heart is beating in your chest. For me personally that involved telling the whole planet why life without the band Oasis would be unlivable, like living without peanut butter.

Everyone thinks they can write now. But they’re not writers. You have to suffer to be a writer. You don’t pay your way in. You can’t study it. You have to live it. And you have to die it. So five years ago today, the internet and some people you’ve never heard of who worked for some magazines that are now out of print, and a bunch of other losers who don’t have anything much to say these days, decided that they were going to try to stop me from writing.

It is five years since I was “cancelled” over a tweet about … not vandalizing synagogues?! However, I kept writing. And I kept writing. And I decided to publish it on my own, without anyone else’s permission. It is not because of everyone who pays for this newsletter that I have been able to keep being a writer. I would have kept writing anyway. It is, however, because of everyone who pays for this newsletter that my writing has status in these times and is deemed valuable enough to support. In this experiment we do as humans, that part matters a lot.

So if I may encourage more of you to consider it, it is only $10 a month, which is how much it costs for two people to go and have a crap cup of coffee in a bad coffee shop and pretend they like each other for 45 minutes. What was the last app you downloaded? It probably cost $10 and you don’t even remember you have it.

To say thank you, I will re-print a piece I wrote a year ago when I could not sleep.

Thank you. It’s been five years since… I don’t know what. People told me I shouldn’t be allowed to be me? Funny how that only ever applies to those of us who actually have something to say.

02:43

I learned how to write at this time. This is when you become a writer. In the wee hours. The brain needs out of the head. Sometimes it’s the plague of a worry that refuses to die in slumber. Sometimes it’s the rush of an idea that required a subconscious requiem to bring it into being. For me, it was the impending death of a deadline. I became a writer while surviving 5,000 miniature deaths by deadline. A digital note on my phone, half-thoughts collected on my fingers while being jolted around by surrounding bodies beneath the strobe lights of a club or a venue, fine-tuned in an Uber en route to this chair, this desk, and a blank page, praying that all the verbal hullabaloo would make sense when the time came to press “send”.

A writer is a diamond that requires pressure, more pressure, even more pressure over the course of years, decades, a lifetime. I don’t believe great writing comes to those who don’t feel the crushing impending suffocation of time running out, of an editor’s ruffled brow, of a judgmental reader, of words that are trapped in the throat, willing you to swallow them, but - fuck no - the truth cannot sit in the gut or else you become sick. I don’t believe great writing comes to those who haven’t vomited every honest feeling and idea at their surrounding world despite the enormous vulnerability of exposure, despite the risk that it would further alienate them at their desk at 3am. I don’t believe great writing comes to those who don’t know how to play out a scene in private without wondering endlessly whether it would be so bad to share every intimate detail out loud and remember it that way, forever. Without these little masochistic edges, you may as well be writing grocery lists, or teaching law. To write is to live with a pen behind your ear, ready to attack every moment.

I own my words, and my words own me. Which way around is it, I wonder at times. Who is the driver? Writing is something to do at 3am when the business of the world has evaporated from the streets and the train stations and the bus stops, and taken up residence in my head instead. It is so loud in here. And the words are such powerful little things. A few letters. A slew of sentences. A couple of paragraphs. Can change a life. Can break a pattern. Can inspire a movement. Can open a heart. Can murder a love. Can catch a fire. Can wake a soul.

I write because one day I would like to be a great writer. It’s a good reason to be awake at 3am as society plots its own suicide. Whatever unfolds, it’s a fucking great story.