Write

“Beware of naysayers, soothsayers and book doctors,” said a kid. “We are together through thick and thin, health and illness. Writing is a disease. We lie for a living. We make things up and write them down. No editor will drink champagne from our skulls. We’re trapped in our bodies, this hospital and labyrinth. You’d think there’d be a word doctor around here moonlighting as a heart specialist. Shine on bright star.”

“Ok,” said the writer kid, “how’s this sound? Write everything in the first five hundred pages, uh, I mean five pages. Grab the reader with a hook at the beginning of every sentence, at the end of paragraphs and the end of chapters. Start and end sentences with a strong word.”

“Good idea,” said a kid, “keep them turning pages. What happens next is a reader’s quest.”

“People are born, live and die. People fart around. Nobody comes. Nothing happens. We are the architects of our actions and live with glorious or tragic consequences. Is this a fill-in-the-blank life test?”

“I only want you to bring two things to class,” screamed an overworked, underpaid, undersexed Hanoi teacher afraid of losing face in front of eighty robots. “Your ears.”

She pounded on a podium with her Marxist pedagogical elephant control stick, “Memorize the text idiots so you can vomit the material on a test.”

“I’m going to be sick,” said a bulimic kid.

“It’s ok to be horrible,” said a kid. “Some writers quit because they want it to be perfect. Many never start. Many never finish. It ain’t about starting, it’s about finishing. Write your dash between birth and death. You need to be passionate about your work without being obsessive-compulsive. Do it because you love it. Make a beautiful fucking mess. Clean it up and make another beautiful mess. Release the monster into the world.”

“Yeah,” said Tran, “a work of art is never finished. It’s abandoned. Like an orphan.”

“Editing is a form of censorship,” said a kid waving a rejection letter. “You don’t want to make the reader work too hard, do you?”

“No, most humans are lazy. Obese, addicted to fast food, screen visuals, social web sites, FaceLost and sex texting with short attention spans. CONTROL owns them. No attention span? No problem.”

“Rewriting is writing. Be cold and unsentimental. Polishing is the party. Being a writer is like having homework every single fucking day.”

“What’s a word doctor?”

“Someone who red lines manuscripts,” said a blind kid waving a Mont Blanc 148 piston fountain pen splattering A- blood on everyone in their radius. “They kill words and sentences.”

“Writing is like digging a well with a needle,” said Orhan Pamuk.

“Punctuation is a nail. Period.”

“Just tell the truth,” said a Cambodian orphan boy, one of 12,000, “and then you don’t have to remember what you said.” His parents rented him to an NGO on weekends for donor sympathy advertising.

“The truth is I need a fix. Does anyone have any spare drugs?” said a gazebo group addict, “I need to get out of here and mainline an adventure.”

A Vietnam veteran screamed, “More drugs, nurse, more drugs. I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been somebody.” A nurse shot him up.

ART

Burma