If it doesn’t come bursting out of you, in spite of everything
Don’t do it
Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut
Don’t do it
If you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched you have rather searching for words
Don’t do it
If you are doing it for money or fame
Don’t do it
If you are doing it because you want women in your bed
Don’t do it
If you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again
Don’t do it
If it’s hard work just thinking about doing it
Don’t do it
If you are trying to write somebody else
Forget about it
If you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait
Patiently
If it never does roar out of you, do something else
If you have to first read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all
You are not ready
Don’t be like so many writers
Don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themself writers
Don’t be dull and boring and pretentious
Don’t be consumed with self-love
The libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind
Don’t add to that
Don’t do it
Unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket
Unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder
Don’t do it
Unless the sun inside you is burning your gut
Don’t do it
When it is truly time
If you have been truly chosen
It will do it by yourself
And it will keep on doing it
Until you die
Or it dies in you
There is no other way
And there never was