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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