How to Write Well!

To me, this is the stupidest question in the world. And since so many people answer it, writing is simply taking a piece of paper or sitting down in front of a computer and writing. Even famous writers don't seem to know how to answer that question. They talk about writing as if it were adding salt to food, flushing the toilet, scratching your head, or walking.

Writing well. You have to write every day as practice, read, and attend workshops. Well, I've never done any of that. I've never written every day. Writing classes always left me frustrated. People said I wrote incorrectly, that I was too verbose, that I needed to study the “hero's journey,” that I wrote in a strange way, without structure.

If I wrote, it was for at least three days a year, year after year. And maybe not even that.

I had written texts and created worlds, but I had no one to read my work. Nobody has time to read something you've written. Your friends are the worst readers you can have because they know your flaws. They like you, but that doesn't necessarily mean they like your writing.

It's like planting seeds in the wrong soil and harvesting silence.

They're the worst supporters, but it makes sense: we do the same thing with their projects. Our writing only gains meaning outside our social circle, when the person reading it doesn't have to like the writer.

When we finally get someone's attention, they start paying attention to us. Only then will they say, “I knew you could do it! You've always had it in you! Now you're successful!”

They talk as if we owed them something for making no effort whatsoever to support us.

It would be like pushing us into a pond full of hippos and crocodiles. You fight the crocodiles and the hippos, come out alive and in one piece, and then your friends show up and say, “I knew you could do it!”

And they watched the whole thing in silence.

Let's not be cruel to our friends. They're busy with their own lives, just as we're busy with ours.

When it comes to writing, I don't care about grammar. I care about whether it moves through me. You don't even need intellect for that; you just need to feel. You don't even have to say what you feel. Just let yourself move with the writing.

I had plenty of texts nobody had read. Some friends who managed to read my work would say, “You're amazing! You're fucking awesome!”

But here's the question: did they say that out of pity? Because the text turned out well? Because they're our friends?

That's cruel.

Then AI came along.

Wow, of course it praises us. People are suspicious because they're not used to receiving compliments from anyone. But when we ask for unbiased criteria, AI doesn't always give us the answer we want. Sometimes it offers an honest, realistic assessment. I was surprised.

When AI evaluates my writing, the question is usually technical, the way an editor would look at what I've written. The texts are evaluated in commercial terms. In that respect, I'm a failure.

But if I write the way the market wants me to, I'll just become another forgettable, standardized author.

I've never seen myself as a professional. I've always seen myself as an amateur because I'm free from rules, almost entirely free from academic biases. It's not that I ignore what has already been written or studied, but I don't let it guide me. I write outside the lines, in places that refuse to be classified.

I wrote something that sometimes doesn't even seem like dystopian fiction, but it is. Something that feels recognizable, but isn't. Something that hasn't been dated yet, that exists in this gray area, outside the structure and the hero's journey.

I became so strange in this regard that I started calling this idea the “Slave's Journey.”

The one who stays. Who builds when everything is lost. Who remains to make tomorrow's bread. They don't turn into a statue, but they bear the weight of what remains. They don't destroy everything, set everything on fire, and then expect the smoke of a revolution to be mistaken for surrender.

This sounds like some kind of literary drug, full of addictions and biases in pursuit of an easy catharsis. After all, human beings want escapism. The world is already far too realistic. But I need this realism after years and years of taking the antibiotics of human morality that come with the hero's journey.

Nobody notices. Maybe I'm crazy, but to me, the world is tired of the hero's journey. Today, we see enslaved countries revealing themselves around the world, societies with more than five thousand years of history and struggle, such as China and Iran. Countries and peoples subjected to structures that remain standing, that survive, adapt, and keep moving forward.

There's something in that which resonates with what I think of as the Slave's Journey.

That's how I began writing the atmosphere, the local folklore, the smells, the mysticism that goes far beyond four-leaf clovers. It ranges from bloodshot eyes to the taste of blood in your mouth. From the cracking of flesh and bones to the act of writing first and only afterward processing what we've done.

Write without looking back.

Read it again and think it turned out well. Then read it again to understand how it came out, without even remembering what the hell you did to get there. And realize it turned out even better.

It feels so believable that it doesn't even seem as though you were the one who wrote it. You don't recognize the demon you unleashed to write those words.

I started writing after reading only the first page of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. But I read it my way: opening, striking line, dialogue, description, conclusion. After that, let God decide.

I made a 594-page book. I thought that was it.

Then I thought: I'll make a 22-second video with the characters moving.

Boom! I made 17 videos, totaling more than three and a half minutes.

I thought that was it.

Boom! Then came the website.

Then the kit, with a whole bunch of items.

Consistency is better than perfection. I gave up that obsession. I let it go. Fuck it! Put this damn thing on the computer. Challenge yourself. Rant and rave. Don't look back.

Fix the car while the engine is still running. Don't stop.

There is no perfect moment to write well. There is courage, even when you're afraid.

Perfection is just a pretty word for saying we've given up, even though we haven't perfectly failed at anything.

And who gets to decide whether something is perfect?

The reader waiting for your words. With your hero's journey or without it. They're waiting for them.

But the hardest part isn't writing.

It's finding that reader while they're still alive.

One of the videos I made:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq9bCPLWjXQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD3_l9RC6dA

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