Axioms for writers in the Bezos-space-cowboy era

1. Don’t cry. If you have to, then cry only once a week.

2. If you have a morning free, do nothing. Do not compensate for yesterday’s laziness, business, not-writing-ness, by writing in the morning. Do nothing. Do not read an online pirated copy of a great book to improve your writing. Do not stream a film to improve your writing. Do nothing. It is impossible to do nothing, let alone in the morning. But practice doing nothing. Make it an art.

3. If you have a few mornings free, do nothing for at least half of them.

4. If you have an evening free, write. If you can’t write then practice writing. Writing is a skill that can be improved with practice. We don’t know yet what the Muse’s opinion is on practice. She probably hates it. But she probably hates all of us, noisy bleating things that we are standing in the field.

5. The formula for being a writer is this: Number of times writing interrupts work should be > number of times work interrupts writing.

6. Prepare for the possibility that you will have to write without the muse. Like Moses leading the chosen to the land of milk and honey absent God’s voice.

7. Learn to write a story in one hour. It is exactly like a quickie with a co-worker during break hour, which means that when you look back it will be hard to believe you were the one who did it.

8. Your experience of time can be summed up in one line. By the time you are done with that one-minute distraction video you clicked on Youtube seven years of your life will have passed, while every minute of focus is only one minute of focus.

9. Learn to recognise the touch of the muse. It might come when you are picking up the kids from home or it might come in the middle of being teargassed or when you on your bicycle are being hunted by a psychopath in a car or when your girlfriend is insulting your face in front of your friends or when the doctor has just informed you that you have terminal cancer. When you feel her fingers touch you, write regardless. Write even if there is hell to pay.

10. Time is a rarer resource than petroleum. There are people who exist only to absorb whatever time you have and there are people who take your time and multiply and return it to you many-fold. Hang out with the second kind.

11. If the book you are writing is making you go insane, you are probably doing something right. If you wanted to give the crowd what they wanted, you could always sell air-coolers. That way you might even make a bit of cash. You are not beholden to the reader in any way. Be insane.

12. If your book is insane I won’t read it.

13. If the book you are writing is making you insane, hide your insanity from friends and family. Especially hide it from your job. If you wake up one day like Gregor Samsa to find that you have turned into a cockroach (mandibles and all), put on your coat and report for work. No one will be able to tell the difference.

14. Unless poverty is home ground, worry about your job. It is warranted.

15. Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to the muse what is hers.

16. You can practice by starting a new story. But what you seem to forget is that you can also practice by finishing an old story.

17. A writer who will live forever practices by launching into a new story. A writer who thinks he will die practices by finishing the story he started seven months ago. If you don’t have an unfinished story in your hard drive, stop referring to yourself as a writer.