Can You Bleed (A post for my writing followers)

My writing mentor didn’t teach me much about psychoanalytic criticism or Marxist theory. If you think a “poststructuralism” is a kind of fashion style, I’m not about to send you out to read academic texts. I don’t care about poststructuralism because my mentor’s highest focus was discovering passion, then learning how to distill and direct it.

He taught me to do, not theorise.

We read and studied books. We discussed how they found their power. We worked through reams and reams of my writing, but we never once wrote essaysabout hermeneutics. We focused onuniversality because my mentor believed that the purpose of writing was to connect.

The best way to connect is to find a passion for reading. It’s to throttle your pretentiousness with as much vehemence as you can muster. It’s toset aside your ego, and spend your life looking for inspiration. That’s how my mentor learned from his mentor, and he became what many called the most influential person in South African literary history.

I’ll never reach that level, but that’s okay because I don’t write essays about hermeneutics. That’s something.

If you want to be a writer, you’ve got to read. You’ve got to love reading, and you’ve got to know why you love reading the books you do. You’ve got to reach into your deepest self and expose your profoundest shame and joy. Only then can you say something in a way that truly reaches your readers. As Hemingway said, it’s easy to be a writer. All you have to do is sit at your typewriter and bleed.

Don’t ignore that irony. Bleeding isn’t easy. It’s a damned side more difficult than learning about psychoanalytic criticism, but if you can find a way to speak the truth through your writing, you’ll have achieved something the average academic rarely does.

Two kinds of people ask me for writing feedback: Beginners and academics. Want to know which of them is harder to teach? The academics. University gives you the potential to perform a hundred new writing sins every day. Working with a literature graduate requires you to expunge those sins—every piece of pretentiousness and every ineffective mechanical tool. That’s five times more work than simply teaching a beginner to achieve universality.

So you’re an academic. Fine, but do you love to read? And can you bleed?