I wrote about Hot Buttered Bullshit over at Cracked, because when someone uses coffee to be anti-science then they’re the enemy of all humanity.

I was rewarded with this glorious comment

I’m not being sarcastic. I want to thank this commenter for imagining a beautiful world where I can make an entire living on one column a week. Yeah, I just get them to throw each article’s bucket of diamonds into the Jewellery Shed. Or maybe I have a Szalinski Atomic Space Reducer and buy a single shot of whiskey and a bacon sandwich each week, returning to full size only to write the next article and go to the shops.

It’s an amazing piece of writing. Possibly the first amazing piece they’ve ever written, considering how they clearly hate their job, and how their communications strategy with a site that (they think) pays better is to insult their crappy columns. We get so much characterization in so few lines of text. They have to work really hard as a writer, but not so hard that they don’t have time to read columns that they don’t even like. It’s just a tragedy that someone correctly identified the spirit “write hard and get on with it” but uses it in the most miserable possible way.

Then again, I’ve never heard a writer excuse their own work by saying “I was only obeying editors.” That doesn’t sound good. Yeah, we have to write as much as we can, but we still get to choose which pieces we take. I’m just flattered they think I don’t have to scrabble for new clients anymore. I’m always working on new pieces, new copy, new niches, new fun. I’ve had some hilarious jobs. And in the future I’ll have more hilarious jobs, as long as they pay.

I’ve written things you people wouldn’t believe.
Auction text for comics on teen romance in the fifties.
I’ve written motivational copy for server synergies with Virtual FutureTrends(TM).
All this … content … will be lost online, like tears in rain.
Time to write.

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The pen is a voodoo pin. It allows people to incant their fears and suffering into the world, unleashing their inner demons, binding them onto a page, and sending them off to bother other people.

That’s why we can read about so many older men suddenly throwing away their older lives for thrills and adventure (“can”, not “should”). So many writers writing about writers thinking about writing, living in worlds where exciting things come from the world into them instead of the other way round, so many badass unstoppable supercool rogues who were hated and feared instead of the truly terrifying fate of not being noticed.

Worries? Fears? Give them to someone else! Create a golem to fill with everything you don’t want in your own head and send them shambling off. The only difference is the amount of writing: not just a few symbols on their forehead, you have to write their forehead (furrowed), the rest of their head, their body, the lot.

Of course, voodoo and monsters are guaranteed to turn back on their creators. That’s what they do.

Using your own experience is a great way to give your characters depth, but you have to use the technique properly. You can’t just vomit your current thoughts directly onto the page. People don’t like picking through someone else’s vomit: it’s unpleasant, it’s mostly unprocessed, and most damningly of all it’s someone else’s problem. You have to choke down your own issues and process them. This process will reveal that the bulk of it turns to shit, but bits will be extracted, integrated, added to your sum total and become something you can usefully use.

At which point you could no more take them out of yourself than you could give your character your toes. Instead you have to climb into their head and steer them yourself.

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I grew up poking at BASIC, so I know X is the ultimate variable. The automatic anything. It marks the spot on every imaginable map, the treasure inconstant but always available. Sure, we’d loop around i’s, and be induced to iterate n, but back in those childish days before it was definitely horizontal, our x could be anything.

Now its function, for x ample, is to defend me from the entire internet.

The internet! The greatest research tool ever assembled and one you absolutely must not use it when writing. Use it when researching. Use it when scribbling and plotting. But when you’re writing it’s all too eager to ask you to come into its parlour, said the spider to the idiot who should be writing. It doesn’t matter what you think you need to check: that factoid is the fresh chunk of cheese in a mousetrap that will chop an entire hour off your life.

Which is when X’s variable powers save me.

X has saved me XOUSANDS of times, over XAYS, XONTHs, ever since XEAR. I don’t have to look up XAME or their XADDRESS or spoken XANGUAGE. I can’t count the XILLIONS of unwasted hours saved by blasting right through momentary fragments of fact instead of surrendering the momentum of movement for a few seconds of flicking around the internet. Eight points in Scrabble and even more valuable in other word work. Never stop writing. The facts and figures will still be there when your head is broken, your hours are aching, and you’re editing a piece instead of invoking it. Cross out the unknown and just keep going.

Thank you, X.

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• Make your lions and tigers fight cyber-octopii while your bears invite bulls to romantic dinners in an attempt to create a race of grizzly centaurs who’ll exterminate capitalism and bullfighting.
• Invent an small sewing antigravity system to prevent pins from ever hitting the ground.
• Make millions by inventing a fad health drink of mixed spilled milk and optical saline.
• Engineer a sticky towel to blinding victorious opponents, allowing you to escape after throwing it at them.
• Dress to kill by inventing power armor and strapping a chainsaw to your wrist.
• If looks could kill, develop a response to the mutant-hunting Sentinel program.

Do all this and more, whatever it takes to avoid clichés. Some writers use phrases they’ve seen before because they think it looks like writing. If it looks like writing, it isn’t good writing, or worse, it’s someone else’s writing that you’re using instead of anything you’ve invented yourself. Writing is a medium for getting your ideas into other people’s brains, the same way air is a medium for getting oxygen into their brains: if they can feel the stuff pushing its way in then something is going horribly wrong.

Zombies! The plaguehorde of unoriginality. Their very definition is “take something which already existed and keep it going long after it should have stopped”. They’ve died twice over: the first time to create themselves, the second time as the internet ran them further into the ground than the six feet deep they started at. Every zombie horse is now a two-dimensional tartare picture, that’s how hard they’ve been beaten, but I’ll always have a necrotizing soft spot for them. Because they gave me an amazing new life as a writer.

Back in 2007 I was screwing around in a laser physics lab and spent a stupid amount of time making a Zombie Safety Poster.

It was fun, it was stupid, and I base my behavior on both so I slung it up on MySpace (I did tell you this was a long time ago) and forgot about it. And then an editor contacted me and asked if I wanted to write for money.

MySpace-page-autoloading-sound-of-record-scratch!

I wasn’t a popular author. I had no online friends. My page had about two visitors, counting me and Tom, but somehow a search had thrown up and this guy looking for writers for the new Cracked magazine wanted to know if I could write something for them, as long as it wasn’t about bloody zombies, because even back in 2007, Jesus Christ, even Jesus Christ was sick of things coming back from the dead and that was his entire deal.

The magazine folded before I could get paid, so they decided to run with the website idea instead, I made a list of internet safety signs and the rest is life-changing history. I even got to use one of the zombie posters in an article, and that article was being paid to nerd out about zombie plan weaponry. I never even dreamed this job because my dreams wouldn’t have believed this. And wouldn’t have paid me to watch my favorite terrible movies of all time.

And just like any internet creator, oh holy shit has it been ripped off more than the face of someone slower than shambling zombies.

My favorite theft has to be the Zazzle print.

That makes me feel so good. Looking over your own writing from seven years ago is like finding your own corpse from seven years ago — crawling with disgusting horrors and the awful knowledge that your younger self somehow did something impossibly wrong — but this makes me feel like Shakespeare. That’s like a schoolkid squeezing Wikipedia through a thesaurus and destroying every single joke in the process. I wouldn’t call myself a master prosodologist, because people would think I wanted to stick my fingers up their ass, but that text has less rhythm than a dead Dalek. And Zazzle put in more work just to destroy things.

So what’s the most important part for anyone who wants to write online? The stupid part. Specifically, the “stupid amount of time” part. I spent an appalling amount of time on that first poster back when I thought it would only be seen by ten people, half of whom wouldn’t care. I matched the colors to the existing posters, I wrote and rewrote the text, I spent ages sucking at drawing (in fact I’ve spent years sucking at drawing and foresee many more) but kept at it until I had something I was happy with. And I’ve never stopped. It’s not about how much you’re paid, it’s about how good the piece is. Especially when you’re being paid nothing, because it’s your only reward. Make it great. Then put it somewhere and get on with the next.

I overanalyse for living! Keep going with Pink Alert on the Starship Enterprise and How Terminator: Salvation Should Have ended.

Every day people ask “How do you start writing?”, blissfully unaware that the answer is the last two words of their own question.

 Behold, five fruits of my writing experience:

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