Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Steven Storrie says



Henry Rollins once said he writes to confront himself. So I’ll go with that. And because I’m good at it, and I don’t think I’m really good at anything else.

When I was five years old I scrawled ‘Elvis Lives’ with crayon on my bedroom wall. I got into shitloads of trouble for that. It’s probably still on there. So that was the start, really. After that I wrote all the time. I only went to school on the days when I knew we were writing stories in English. All the others times I skipped class and hung out listening to music. I started to get serious about it, as in ‘being a writer’, when I was about 22, I suppose.

I tend to write with seriously loud music blasting. Seriously loud. In fact I’ve went from having the police coming round telling me to ‘turn it down’ to them going ‘fucking hell, what is that tune?!’
So I try to write during the day if I can. Then I usually edit stuff on a night when it’s quieter. It isn’t a hard and fast rule, though. When the spirit comes, I do its bidding. You have to write whenever it comes to you, no matter what time of day it is. Get it down as soon as possible. That’s generally where the best stuff comes from.

I think you have to wade into it like you’re trying to smash the legs of your opponent. Take a hammer to their knees. All the best stuff comes from a place of truth and honesty. Blood and thunder. Get good and fucking angry before you work. Let it fly and don’t hold anything back. Then, on the days where you can’t do that, days where you have no juice or nothing to say, don’t write anything at all. Leave it and wait for the fury to come back. That way you’ll only write what’s good and true.

And don’t worry about trying to polish it to perfection. Steve Aylett once said that most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader’s senses. I think that’s true. I like a ragged edge every now and again. I’m like the nail that snags your coat. You may not like me, but you’re damn sure gonna fucking notice me.

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