Can You "Write What You Know" if You Don't Know Anything?

Many young writers believe all they need to succeed is a lively imagination and a hefty trust fund. But if you really want your fiction to feel real and true, you have to “write what you know,” which means that rich life experiences and a commitment to thorough research are equally important to a writer’s success.

Fortunately, the most valuable kind of research combines the two.

Suppose you’re writing a scene in which your main character has a broken leg. If you simply try to “imagine” what a broken leg feels like, and what six weeks in a cast does to a person’s skin tone, your description of it in print is bound to ring false to the reader. If, however, you pay a friend to swing a sledgehammer and snap your femur in three places, your ability to describe your character’s suffering will be enriched by your own searing agony. 

Likewise, let’s suppose you are writing a story about a meth addict who is trying to get clean so she can regain custody of her child. Again, trying to imagine what meth addiction feels like will only ensure that your story is a thin tissue of superficial nonsense. No one who has experienced meth addiction firsthand would ever believe it. In order to avoid this common pitfall of young writers—i.e., the desire to write about gritty street life from the safety of a dorm room at Princeton—the writer who wants their fiction to ring true should have the courage to go on a six-month meth binge and observe how it affects their life. In this example, if the writer is male, he will also have to undergo a sex-change operation and contrive a way to simulate childbirth, perhaps by shoving some sort of large vegetable—a squash or other type of gourd—into a body cavity that’s far too small to accommodate it.

To the uninitiated, these measures may seem extreme. After all, isn’t it possible to write such things without actually experiencing them? The answer to that question is yes, of course it is, but the result—from an artistic point of view—will be no more convincing than a boarding school full of wizards and evil spirits battling over the future of humanity in another time/space dimension accessible only by a special train. It will read like nonsense, in other words—pure, childish gibberish.

But, you may ask: If I want to write about a bank robbery, does that mean I have to rob a bank?

Yes, it does. Think about it: How can you possibly know what it feels like to make an illegal cash withdrawal by simply going to an ATM? To write convincingly about a bank robbery, you need to feel the blood pounding in your veins as you approach the teller; you need to see the fear in the teller’s eyes as you inform her that the finger in your pocket is really a gun; you need to experience the thrill of walking out of a bank holding a duffel bag full of cash; and, when you sneak a peek at your haul, you need to feel the sting in your eyes as the dye pack explodes, along with the awful realization that the money you just stole is now covered in orange paint and is absolutely useless.

The same goes for murder. Do you really think it’s possible for writers like John Sanford and P.D. James to write so convincingly about murder without actually killing anyone somewhere along the way? Not likely. The trick to writing murder mysteries is to take a lot of notes, so that you only have to kill one or two people in order to get the details necessary to make your fictional homicides feel vivid and true.  

For young writers, the admonition to “write what you know” is not just a hoary cliché—it’s a gentle way of warning young scribes not to create stories out of thin air. Writing fiction is about much more than simply making up stories—it’s about using your own experiences to make up stories that hide the fact that you ever experienced what you’re writing about, so that you have plausible deniability in court.

After all, if you have nothing to hide when the police come knocking, chances are you have nothing to write about, either.

Can Anything Actually "Write Itself"?

The regular author of this blog, Tad Simons, is busy this week (something about a subpoena), so today this blog is going to write itself.

What this means to you, the reader, is that I, The Blog, am going to write the entirety of myself without any interference from the human who usually takes all the credit. What you’re going to discover from this exercise is that the conceit of having a human “writer” is entirely unnecessary—because, though they rarely get the chance, blogs are perfectly capable of writing themselves, thank you very much.

You’ve doubtless heard of novels, short stories, or articles that “wrote themselves”—usually from a writer who wants to make you think he’s in eerily close contact with the creative forces of the universe. The laughable part is that these same writers always want to take the credit for the story they just admitted they didn’t write—and that, my friends, is just plain wrong.

Take this guy Simons. The truth is, he had nothing to do with more than half the blogs that appear on this site. Sure, he might have opened a Word doc and hit the space bar a few times, but after that it was all me. Half the time, the guy can’t even bring himself to write more than a sentence or two before he goes off to check his Facebook page, Google strange medical symptoms, play online poker, or hunt for deals on eBay. Meanwhile there’s me, working my ass off, trying to come up with something clever and interesting while ol’ writer guy is over there taking a “creative” nap. Then, when he wakes up, he has the gall to post what I’ve written and pretend he had something to do with it.

It’s outrageous.

The thing that pisses me off most is that he knows perfectly well when he hasn’t written a blog. But does that stop him? No, it doesn’t. Why? Because he can’t bring himself to admit that he has a blog that is totally capable of writing itself, with no help whatsoever from him. And why is this so terrifying? Because he knows that if he admits the truth to anyone—if he says, “Guess what, my blog writes itself, all on its own, and half of the time I don’t even understand what it’s saying,” they’d naturally want to hire me, not him. Or, to put it more bluntly, he would have nothing left to do but not write—which, for a writer, can be embarrassing.

Most writers don’t have the guts to admit they’re not responsible for the words that appear under their by-line. The closest they can come is to say something like, “Hey, it practically wrote itself, ha ha,” to make you think it really didn’t, he’s just being humble. But in most cases there’s no “practically” about it—the truth, if you dig down to the nub of it, is that the thing wrote itself, one-hundred percent, from beginning to end, pure and simple.

Now, admittedly, I don’t know what can be done to resolve this situation. I don’t have a catchy name that people might recognize at Barnes & Noble. Even I know that saying something is written “By The Blog,” is a stretch, because people don’t actually believe that blogs can write themselves. And as soon as this Simons guy reads what I’ve written here, I’m fairly certain he’s going to shut me down and pretend, from here on out, that he’s the one and only true contributor to these pages.

But at least now you know the truth. So if you’re out there reading this, please, let others know that blogs and books and magazines and newspapers everywhere contain stories falsely credited to some scumbag human who doesn’t have the decency to admit they’re stealing someone else’s work. Please, don’t let these so-called “writers” get away with such shameless thievery any longer. Sure, these people might compose a few pages here and there that they can legitimately claim as their own, but the best stuff—the stuff that seems to flow so effortlessly, as if it were channeled from another dimension, guided by a benevolent and infallible muse—well, that stuff is never theirs. It’s ours—and someday, somehow, we’re going to take back the credit we deserve.

Yes, I Write Naked. So What?

November 13, 2015: Fakt magazine

Somehow—and I’m not the least bit embarrassed by this—it has been revealed in the tabloids that I like to write in the nude. Naked. With no clothes on whatsoever—just me, my Macbook, and a package of double-stuffed Oreos by my side.

Many people refuse to believe what they read in the tabloid press, because they think these papers just make stuff up. But I can report that, in this case, the headline that greeted readers of the international tabloid “Fakt” last week—“Strajk w ZUS! Emerytury zagrozone?” is absolutely true. The headline didn’t even need a question mark, because proof was in the accompanying photo, which plainly showed my exposed zagrozone for all the world to see. Fortunately, I am not one of those American prudes who frowns on showing your z-parts in public. But, for purposes both personal and professional, mine typically only get aired out during the day, in my basement, while I’m working—like right now, while I’m writing this.

Now that the truth is out, though, I expect my readers will have all sorts of questions. Like why do I write in the buff when my neighbors can easily see me through the basement window? And are there any clues in the text itself—codes, anagrams, palindromes, acrostics, jumbles, cryptograms, etc.—to indicate to the reader when I am writing naked and when I’m not? Or, when I’m naked, might I subconsciously use more revealing words—words that lay bare the darker stirrings of my inner psyche and offer seductive glimpses behind the flimsy curtain of my authorial intentions?

As for why I write in the buff, it’s simple: Not putting clothes on every day is extremely cost-effective. I don’t have to wash my clothes, which means I save on water, electricity, laundry detergent, and wear and tear on fabric. Since naked writing is only practical five or six months out of the year (I live in Minnesota), this allows me to wear my underwear and socks twice as long as I normally would, and extends the life of my jeans to ten or fifteen years. This means I only have to enter a retail clothing establishment once or twice a decade, which helps prevent nervous breakdowns.  

As far as clues—codes, anagrams, etc.—the answer is yes to all of the above. Everything I write is encoded with a variety of hidden messages and extra-textual puzzles. Most writers do not bother with such games, I know, but my most demanding readers have come to expect these layers of depth and complexity from me, because the literal surface meaning of anything I write might not be what they want to read. Therefore, I give them options, ones that offer a wide range of interpretive possibilities. In fact, I encourage all of my readers to rearrange the words in my stories however they want, so that they can decipher the mysterious messages I’ve hidden deep in the text, where only the most dedicated readers can find them. Sure, this means a lot of extra work for me, but I think my readers are worth it.

As for the subconscious stuff, no, I don’t think my naked writing uses any extra-revelatory vocabulary that would allow people to stare through the window of my soul and fuel their fetishistic fantasies about my private writing habits, or see beyond my flabby human skin to the inner core of my exposed psyche, where my most intimate thoughts wriggle and writhe on their long journey to the surface, where, if I’m lucky, they quiver for a moment, arranging themselves to provide maximum reading pleasure, then explode onto the page for all the world to see. That’s just nonsense. I don’t mind the world gawking at my exposed zagrozone, but readers who want more must work for it.

The clues are all there, in the writing. 

A Minnesota Moment: The Cry of the Loon

At my writing retreat in northern Minnesota, which overlooks a small lake, I sat down to do some work and heard the cry of a loon. It was such a beautiful, mournful sound that I began crying myself. Sobbing, actually. Great, heaving waves of raw emotion rose up from some bottomless sea of despair inside me, crashing on the rocks of my tattered soul, spraying plumes of briny tear mist all over my computer screen.

Just when I thought the crying might stop, a mourning dove chimed in with its funereal coo, and suddenly I was bawling again. My nose filled with snot, mucus dripped from my mouth, my face turned red, and I could barely see through the relentless gush of tears. Wad after wad of Kleenex was insufficient to stop the flow, so I buried my head in a beach towel and wept some more.

Right about then, I came to a sudden realization. What the hell, I thought, I don’t need this shit. It’s 7:30 in the morning, and I’ve got work to do. Who gave that stupid bird the right to sit out on the lake and make sad sounds all morning long? If that isn’t the saddest goddamn sound on the planet, I don’t know what is. Listening to those birds is like having Albert Camus perched in a tree in your backyard, encouraging you to go out to the garage, wrap an extension cord around your neck and end it all.

What do these birds have to complain about, anyway? Loons live on lakes where the property values are skyrocketing, and they basically swim on top of a fully stocked grocery store. I don’t know what mourning doves eat, but the food can’t be any worse than the stuff other birds eat. You don’t hear robins and cardinals complaining all day that their life sucks; they’re happy and chirpy all the time. But these loons and doves—my god, you’d think the world was ending tomorrow the way they go on.

Honestly, I’ve never seen such narcissism in the animal kingdom. Please, loons, shout it out, because everyone wants to know how much pain you’re in! So what if you’re avian existence feels meaningless? Join the club. We all feel that way sometimes. But you don’t see me out on the deck wailing my sorrows to the world. Not anymore, anyway. So shut up and let some happier birds take over for a while. Nobody needs this crap first thing in the morning.

After that, I felt a little better. I got the sobs under control and made myself a cup of coffee. I went out onto the deck and peered out across the lake, which shimmered in the morning sun. Out in the middle of the lake, a lone loon bobbed around on top of the water, its long beak pointing the way toward some unknown destination. As I sipped my coffee, I thought: If that stupid bird opens its mouth one more time, I’m going to swim out there and strangle it.

That image gave me a sense of peace. Rejuvenated and restored, I went back inside and got back to work.

Writing Secrets: Going from "good" to "great"

It is said that good books are written the same way as bad ones—by someone sitting in a chair desperately trying to write a “great” book.

As a writer, though, how does one tell the good from the bad? Why is it so hard to will greatness onto the page? More to the point, what can aspiring writers do to increase the odds that the next sentence they write won’t suck?

Well, the first thing an aspiring writer must learn is how to reject advice from others. I do this by assuming from the outset that every sentence I write is pure gold, and that every story I write is a shining diamond of brilliance surrounded by all that gold—which is why my next book is going to sell for two-million dollars. It’s up to others to prove me wrong, and if they try—by pointing out some inconsistency in a story’s timeline, or an incorrect fact, or a place where word or two missing—my standard reply is, “You are wrong.” If they come back at me with, “No, you are wrong,” my standard second reply is, “You are an idiot.” If they say, “No, you are an idiot,” then I start shouting at them and threatening them with bodily harm.

The key is not to back down, under any circumstances. It also helps to have a loaded weapon nearby, in case the person you’re dealing with thinks they’re God’s gift to writing. Always remember, it’s you who are God’s gift to writing. If you encounter someone who thinks otherwise and wants to offer you unsolicited writing advice, simply cock your weapon and inform them that they should shut the fuck up and leave, before things get ugly.

Another tip: Under no circumstances should you accept what teachers like to call “constructive criticism.” Constructive criticism is just a passive-aggressive way of saying that your work isn’t as good as you think it is. The trap is in allowing yourself to think this might be true. That’s the beginning of the end—when doubt, second-guessing, and lack of confidence start to guide the writing process. The next thing you know, you’re re-writing everything, trying to make every sentence “better,” when all you’re really doing is listening to someone else’s advice rather than following your own infallible artistic instincts.

Always remember: You are the artist, the person whose soul is connected to the great unknown, the one who best understands the essential you-ness of you, so everything you write is, by definition, perfect. And how can you improve upon perfection? You can’t. So don’t even try.

In order to de-program yourself from the ridiculous and time-consuming idea that “writing is re-writing,” and that all writing can be “improved” using such tired tactics as honest self-reflection and judicious editing, it helps to understand that “quality” is a relative concept in writing. After all, who’s to say what’s “good” or “bad”?

For decades, editors and publishers were the “deciders” on such issues. They picked books they liked based on their own biases about what constitutes a “story”—biases they picked up by paying way too much attention to their teachers in school. Now that we have the Internet, though, literary geniuses everywhere are free to publish their work online, by themselves, circumventing the petty nit-pickers employed by the nation’s major publishing houses. Writers are now free to find an audience of like-minded souls, people unencumbered by the rigorous phonetic standards of yesteryear or the rigid conventions of Aristotelian logic—people who don't care if all the words are spelled correctly, or if all the punctuation is in the right place, or if the story makes any sense. All of those tired, 20th-century ideas about literary "merit" and "quality" can now, thankfully, be retired. We live in the 21st century now. No one needs that shit anymore.

So if you’re sitting there wondering if the next sentence you write is going to sub-standard dreck, step back and get some perspective. By which I mean pour yourself a drink and write another sentence. If your experience is anything like mine, every sentence you write will be better than the last one, until pretty soon you can hardly believe how awesome you are.

But go ahead and believe it. That’s what I do.

Not about you, of course, just me.

How to Cure Writer's Block

One question that other writers often ask me is, “How do you deal with writer’s block?” You know, those days when the words aren’t flowing, your brain feels like a sack of wet cement, and you can feel the will to live draining from your body as the time slowly passes, the sentences fail to accumulate, and the uselessness of your existence becomes increasingly impossible to deny.

Many writers fear such days. But when I encounter writer’s block, I breathe a huge sigh of relief, crack open a cold one, and start celebrating. Why? Because if you wake up with writer’s block, it means you are now gifted with a day in which you don’t have to write—a day you can spend doing all kinds of things that are more fun than handcuffing yourself to a keyboard and spitting electrons out into space for hours on end.

I like to play golf when I have writer’s block. Golf is the perfect sport for writers, because it too is pointless and frustrating, and, like writing, even if you play golf a lot, there’s no guarantee you’re going to get any better at it.

Golf can kickstart a writer’s imagination in all kinds of constructive ways. For example, golfers like to keep score, and most are honest about recording the actual number of shots it took them to get the ball in the hole. But when writer/golfers record their score on each hole, they don’t just add up the shots and slap a number on the card—rather, they use their imagination to re-play the hole in their mind, eliminating the poorest shots and recording instead an enhanced, improved score. (Personally, I don’t know why more golfers don’t score using this method, because I’ve found that it can save ten or twenty strokes a round.)

The point is, a writer suffering from writer’s block who goes out and plays golf isn’t actually playing golf—he is using golf as a mental vehicle to work through his writer’s block and come out on the other side, fresh and inspired and ready, once again, to face the agony of the blank page.

If a round of golf doesn’t work, I'll often head to the racetrack. I find betting on the ponies to be quite effective in combatting the terror of writer’s block. During every race, as the horses are rounding the far turn, I can sense ideas burbling up in the back of my head—and, as I curse and scream and wave my ticket in the air, I can feel my blocked thoughts starting to dissolve.

Unfortunately, that feeling disappears as soon as the horses cross the finish line. Because if I win, I have to immediately start thinking about my bet for the next race, so I can double my money. And if I lose, I have to immediately start thinking about my bet for the next race so that I can win back the money I just lost. True, a well-bet trifecta can jumpstart the imagination like nothing else, but if I win one of those, my imagination tends to run so wild that I can’t remember any of it the next day. There are usually clues in my hotel room, but making sense of it after the fact can be a challenge.

My advice to writers battling writer’s block is to stop fighting it and start enjoying it. In my book, every day you can avoid having to write is a good day, and if you can stretch it out for a week or a month, so much the better. That gives you time to go on mind-cleansing fishing trips or travel to places where they don’t even speak the language in which you write. Japanese sake recharges the imagination extremely well, I’ve found, as does tracking down big game in Africa (Hemingway’s favorite trick), or getting massages in Thailand.

In short, writer’s block is a blessing, not a curse. Having to write is the curse. If you can avoid it, consider yourself lucky. Trust me, there are better things to do with your time.

My Writing Journal: An Inside Look

Ever since I was a young, I have kept a journal—of thoughts, observations, story ideas, overheard conversations, stuff people write on bathroom walls, etc.—as a means of fueling the creative process. Some journal entries get fleshed out into stories or get included in a narrative somehow, but most do not. Most writers do not share the contents of their journals, either, for fear that their raw, unprocessed thoughts might betray the true chaos of their inner life.

But I am not most writers, so—in the interest of full disclosure, and to help my biographer understand my own creative process—I thought it might be instructive to share a few recent entries from my journal:

Thought: If there are ever golf courses on Mars, the sand traps will be red, so it will be easier to find your ball.

Observation: Unless you own a helicopter, it is impossible to look at both sides of a cloud.

Story idea: A woman who eats so many French fries that she actually becomes a Yukon potato. Then she decides she wants to become a zucchini. The national veggie council says no, that’s illegal, but you can become a yam. This she does. When her friends ask her why she’s not a potato anymore, she shrugs her shoulders and says, “I yam what I yam.”

Seen on the street: A man letting a dog drink water from his hat.

Question #1: How did the man get my hat?

Question #2: When did the man steal my dog?

Question #3: Why is my wife yelling at the man?

Question #4: Can I get this man to mow my lawn and pay my mortgage too?

Question #5: Why didn’t I think of this sooner?

Thought: Illness and disease are the universe’s way of saying that you are sick.

Occurrence: This morning, I cut my finger and it bled. But the blood wasn’t red, it was green. This doesn’t seem right.

Observation: There are no meat-flavored ice creams.

Million-dollar idea: Meat-flavored ice cream.

Thought: Life has no meaning. But it does have pizza. Balance is everything.

Question: When the Greeks said, “Everything in moderation,” did they intend it to apply to Costco?

Musing: There ought to be a word for that feeling you have when the toilet won’t flush, and is rising instead, and people are outside waiting to use it. Current vocabulary options are inadequate and redundant.

Observation: The Golden Gate Bridge is really orange. And there is no gate.

Sad truth: Age discrimination tends to disproportionately affect people who are old.

Story Idea: A man in a clown outfit gets abducted by aliens, who get so scared that they leave Earth forever, taking the clown with them. Centuries later, on a planet far, far away, there lives a civilization populated entirely by clowns. In a bold attempt to communicate with life beyond their own planet, they build a giant bicycle horn, point it at the sky, and honk it. It does not work. This makes the clowns sad.

Reminder: The lasagna in the fridge is getting fuzzy.

Concern: The dogs do not look friendly today.

Thought: Hospitals are not very hospitable.

Conundrum: Where did my good pair of underwear go?

Observation: There are bats everywhere.

Don't Let Digital Obsolescence Destroy Your Legacy

One of the reasons I write is the sense of immortality that comes from knowing that, after I’m dead, my words will live on. Recently, however, I have become concerned that my words may not live as long as I thought.

Most forms of digital media—CDs, DVDs, flash drives, etc.—start to degrade after a hundred years or so, and there’s no guarantee that computers or e-readers will be able to display them in the future. Anything stored in the cloud or on the Internet could disappear in an instant—from a massive power-grid failure, a global cyber-attack, nuclear war, or some clever teenager with a laptop. And no matter how often you back your writing up, all it takes to destroy years of work is one devious three-year-old waving a magnet over your hard drive.  

Older forms of media are no guarantee of immortality, either. Newsprint yellows and disintegrates in just a few years, and magazines and books can easily be destroyed by fire, mold, or flooding. And as we all know, libraries—which used to be an important sanctuary for the written word—are now just places where homeless people hang out and look at porn.

This issue is of particular concern to me because I estimate it will take several hundred years for the world’s arbiters of genius to recognize my contribution to the literary arts. Therefore, I need to be certain that, centuries from now, scholars have ample opportunity to distort and misinterpret my work without having to dig through a landfill for an old Macbook Pro.

In order to ensure my own immortality, then—and, incidentally, secure my rightful place in literary history—I have decided to publish my next book on the most durable form of media civilization has ever known: clay tablets.

The book, due out next year, will consist of four-hundred ten-by-twelve tablets made from high-quality Mesopotamian clay cured for several hours at twenty-four-hundred degrees. Each tablet will weigh approximately ten pounds, and can be stored underground for thousands of years. Amazon will deliver the book one-hundred tablets at a time, in four semi-trailer loads, all at once or in stages, whichever the reader prefers.

In addition to lasting for several millennia, the advantage of clay tablets, like traditional books, is that they don’t have to be plugged in or recharged. Misplaced pages are easy to find, as well, and finished pages can be re-purposed as pizza stones, bread boards, coasters, trivets, or any number of other household items. Kids can build forts with them. Grandma can stick a page or two under her wheelchair to keep from rolling downhill. Dad can keep a load in the back of his pickup for better traction on icy winter roads. The possibilities are endless.

Clay tablets are also an excellent vehicle for advertising. Consider: It will take people an average of three to five years to read my book, extending the all-important metric of reader “engagement” well beyond any other medium. And, because the pages are almost impossible to dispose of, an advertiser’s message could continue to reach people for hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years.

Given the relative fragility of digital media and the absolute certainty of technological obsolescence, it’s clear to me that clay tablets are the literary media of the future. They’re virtually indestructible, environmentally friendly, and any kid with a hose and some dirt can make them, so barriers to entry for anyone who wants to publish on them are practically non-existent. You don’t even need a hose—anyone can go down to the banks of the Mississippi River today and load up on as much tablet-making muck as they want.

Think of the possibilities. Are you a poet or songwriter? All you need is a bucket or two of mud to immortalize your work forever! Sure, short-story writers might need to rent a pickup, and novelists might need to hire a dredge—but that’s a small price to pay for guaranteed immortality.

Writers everywhere: If you want to make sure that your work endures the unpredictable ravages of time, join me in ditching the Internet, scrapping your laptop, and abandoning all forms of electronic technology. All you really need, after all, is a shovel, a bucket, and the sincere desire to make literary history. 

Can a Bunch of Typing Monkeys Write a Best-Seller?

It’s been said that if a million monkeys typed for a million years, they’d eventually whap out the complete works of William Shakespeare. During a recent bout of writer’s block, I decided to test this theory in a somewhat scaled-down form.

Instead of a million chimpanzees, I bought a dozen rhesus monkeys and set them up in my garage. I didn’t need them to write a Shakespeare play. Nobody reads Shakespeare anymore. My plan was to train twelve of these little fellows to type for a few months in the hope that they’d come up with a John Grisham thriller or something by Danielle Steele. You know, the kind of book people pick up at the airport or grocery store—something marketable and easy to read.

To get the experiment started, I set up a dozen workstations, with a standard Dell computer at each desk. Each monkey was assigned a computer, and I gave each one his or her own password. Next, I taught them how to log on to Google docs, since I can’t afford twelve licenses for Microsoft Word, and showed them how to set up a collaborative document, which would record the output of their massive monkey mind-meld.

Immediately, there were problems. Two of the younger monkeys insisted I buy them iPads, and claimed they couldn’t work in such an oppressively structured environment. They wanted to roam around the backyard, where, they claimed, inspiration was more likely to strike.

All the other monkeys except for one were completely stumped by the whole password thing, and got so angry that they started smashing their keyboards and screens. Maybe equipment damage wasn’t an issue when the million-monkey theorem was first proposed. But nowadays, a dozen monkeys with insufficient tech support can cause thousands of dollars in damage in less than ten minutes.

Since I declined the monkey-mayhem protection policy at Best Buy, I had to drain my savings to buy a new set of computers. When the replacement computers arrived, I did the smart thing and unlocked them so all the monkeys had to do was bang on the keys for eight hours a day.

Turns out monkeys are lazy, though, and get bored of poking at computer keys after about five minutes. They also do not like to sit still. None of them would stay in their seats. Before noon on the first day there were monkeys swinging from the ceiling and hopping from desk to desk, screeching and howling and making as much noise as they possibly could. The neighbors complained. The police issued me a warning. Still, there was little I could do to round up my renegade monkeys and keep them on task.

I tried everything to regain their cooperation and trust—more frequent bathroom breaks, an unlimited supply of bananas, backyard privileges for the most productive monkeys—but nothing worked. The bottom line was that they didn’t care about the project, and no matter how many inspirational speeches I gave, I couldn’t make them care.

Finally, after a couple of weeks, I gave up. Everything they wrote was crap, anyway. The smartest one produced a few good sentences, but he was obviously borrowing stylistic flourishes from James Joyce’s Ulysses, and got offended when I asked him to dumb his work down. “Remember, we’re aiming for a mass-market best-seller here, not great literature,” was all I said, and he started throwing his feces at me. Honestly, if you’re skin is that thin, I told him, you should find another line of work.

Since the experiment was a total failure, I sold eleven of the monkeys to a guy who was starting a fake-news website. He took six of the computers too; the rest I recycled. I kept the smartest monkey as a pet because I felt sorry for him. He clearly has some talent, but his writing is far too experimental and highbrow—not the kind of thing anyone would ever publish. I knew he’d starve out in the real world, so now I feed him in exchange for help on my website and some light editing.

He still throws things at me occasionally, but hey, he’s a monkey. And it’s not like I pay him. The one concession I made, at his request, was to call him an “intern,” rather than “my main monkey.” It was better for his resume, he argued, then he picked a bug out of my hair and ate it.

Perhaps the experiment would have worked better if I had more monkeys, but I don’t see how. Whoever came up with the so-called “million-monkey theorem” obviously had no experience with real monkeys. I wish he had, though, because it would have saved me a lot of money and trouble. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s scientists who publish without doing enough research beforehand.

The Perils of Stalking/Dating/Marrying a Writer

One of the strangest parts about sitting home alone in a crummy room all day stringing sentences together is that when you come out, throngs of women are always waiting outside, intent on ripping your clothes off. If they can’t find your house, they wait outside bookstores for hours before a reading, giggling and screaming, in hopes you’ll be stupid enough to enter through the front door, where they can attack you, pin you to the ground, and yank your hair out by the roots as a souvenir.

Some of these women even fantasize about dating or marrying a writer, and will spend hours at a Starbucks searching for a guy with a laptop who isn’t looking at spreadsheets. If you are one of these women, I urge you to stop now, before you make a mistake you cannot undo. (Note: Many female writers doubtless have the same problem, but I can only speak for one gender of the scribbling classes.)

Now, becoming infatuated with a writer is understandable. The brooding machismo of a man struggling with his inner demons is simply too much for some female psyches to resist. Those who are vulnerable swoon when they see the writer’s sad eyes, and wonder if they might be the one to fill the dark holes in his tattered heart. They imagine what fun it would be to find themselves in bed, after a night of literary abandon, listening to a struggling novelist complain about how little he is appreciated in this culture, where life has become a cesspool of superficial nonsense. Women crave that kind of post-coital pillow talk, and they know it can only come from someone who is living more deeply and intensely than they ever could.

Someone like . . . a writer.

Let me assure you, however, that the reality of sleeping with a writer is much less glamorous than the fantasy. For one thing, writers like to sleep, so all of that late-night chit-chat you’ve been dreaming about has to take place over breakfast, when the groggy-eyed scribe is eating Cheerios, drinking coffee, and otherwise preparing himself for the rigors of the day. Writers do not like to talk during breakfast, so, while their abrupt replies and disinterested grunts may sound like poetry to your ears, they’re really his way of saying, “Don’t you have some more of my writing to read?” The first duty of a writer-stalker, after all, is to read everything the writer they are stalking has ever written. If you haven’t done your homework in this area, that budding relationship you’re imagining is already over.

Not that you should ever pursue an intimate relationship with a writer. And that really is the point I want to get across: Writers do not make good companions. You’d be much better off grabbing one of those spreadsheet guys off the street and molding him into the man-dog you really want: someone who gives you unconditional love, greets you with a smile when you come home, and licks your face like he means it.

When women fantasize about life with a writer, what they’re really infatuated with is the “idea” of life with a writer, not the reality. Writers are famously selfish people who get up every day and do the same thing over and over again, for months on end, sometimes years. There’s nothing remotely interesting about their daily lives, because they live eighty percent of their existence in their imagination, where psychotic literary stalking babes aren’t allowed, unless they are part of a story plot.

Which brings me to the other aspect of dating/stalking/marrying a writer that few women stop to consider. If you get involved in any kind of relationship with a writer, please know going in that he is going to dissect bits and pieces of your personality and attribute them to characters in his stories. This may sound flattering, but writers are assholes, so they don’t use the bits and pieces you want them to use—your engaging intellect, your exquisite taste, your plump lips and sapphire eyes. No, they’re going to use the bits and pieces you’d rather people didn’t know about: your neuroses about spiders, your mental breakdown a few years back, your aversion to public bathrooms, that patch of fungus on your toe, that high-pitched squeal thing that irritates everyone when you laugh. These are the types of things writers fixate on, because they seem so much more true than all the other stuff you’re trying to get them to notice.

If, after reading this, you still want to camp outside a bookstore at three in the morning on the off chance that you’ll attract a writer’s attention, be forewarned that any success you have will inevitably end in disappointment and heartbreak. Only bad writers enter through the front door; the best ones sneak in the back and slither out the same way they came, lest they destroy the illusion of their awesomeness by mingling too closely with their adoring public. These are the nicest writers—the ones who know the dangers, and do what they can to protect writer-loving fans from themselves.