Match The Advice Column To The Famous Writer!

Writing Life

1. If you’re loaded and only a fair shot, that evening might not be the perfect time to tell your wife to put a highball glass on her head and then to try to shoot it off her. Not saying don’t do it, of course. Maybe just try it first at home, at close range, or wait until you don’t have the shakes from your heroin withdrawal. On the other hand, if you do happen to go through a decades-long massive heroin addiction, make sure to have plenty of napkins with you and write everything down.

2. As proud as you are of your emperor and samurai tradition, there are, come to think of it, other ways to show your loyalty than ritual disembowelment and subsequent beheading. You could always, for instance, have yourself photographed naked as St. Sebastian in an homage to the indissolvable nexus of beauty and cruelty or just lift weights all the time like a crazy person. But if you do go the disembowelment and beheading route, maybe make sure that you and your associates practice it a few times first. 

3. In retrospect, the best dating prospect may not be the wife of the head of the NKVD. Yes, there’s much to be said for being the sort of person who picks a fight in the town square; who, if the sky had rings to it, would pull the sky to the earth; who can satisfy a Russian woman for a night. But do keep in mind that the man keeps the skull of his predecessor as a paperweight on his desk.

4. When writing odes to Stalin, emphasize his magnanimity and warrior’s bonhomie. On the whole, steer away from talking about his fat fingers. He really hates being reminded of his fat fingers. 

5. Attorneys can be used for legal counsel, or for advice on matters like contracts and accounting. Or you and your attorney could get loaded on a combination of LSD, ether, benzedrine, adenochrome, weed, cocaine, and tequila, drive 150 miles into the desert for no particular reason, terrorize a hitchhiker, kidnap a teenage girl, and order room service. Lots of room service.

6. Your liver is diseased. You are sick. And spiteful. Also unattractive. You could go to a doctor, but you could also stay away. Out of spite. Will your spite for the doctors injure them? Of course not. But that’s all the purer, from the perspective of the spite. 

7. While there is a great deal to be said for founding natural science and journalism, you could also get the sources and data you need by waiting for the volcano to cool down as opposed to rushing in moments after it explodes. 

8. If the king wants to divorce his first wife and marry a second wife, no problem! That’s great! Is she Protestant? Even better! Who can possibly have problems with Protestants! No objection from me at all, your majesty, none at all. 

9. No photographs, please! No photographs! Is that a shutter — I said no photographs! I am a complete recluse (even if I happen to live in Manhattan) and you can’t know anything about me! I am a half-mad eccentric and utterly despise the literary community and industry (and it means absolutely nothing at all that my wife is the most powerful literary agent in the city)!

10. A writing routine should be as simple and regular as possible — something that you can repeat every day. For me, every day without fail, I go driving pell-mell around the countryside in search of the right place to write, while my partner screams at me for my driving and I scream back at her for being simple and then eventually, at dusk, we find the rock for that day’s writing and I scribble for about 15 minutes before it gets completely dark. 

a) Fyodor Dostoevsky

b) Yukio Mishima

c) Osip Mandelstam

d) Gertrude Stein

e) William S. Burroughs

f) Hunter S. Thompson

g) Pliny the Elder

h) Isaac Babel

i) Sir Thomas More

j) Thomas Pynchon