Hey, ho, let’s go!
Reading Assignment for this class: “Liechen’s War Part 1”, “Liechen’s War Part 2” and “Malice” chapters from Teardrop Road
Writing Assignment for this class: The writing assignment from Class 2 is due today. Send it to jesseteller (at) yahoo (dot) com. Remember to rate and review your performance at the bottom of the assignment.
Writer’s Block is something I just don’t believe in. I just don’t believe in it. I used to. When I was in high school and early college, I believed in writer’s block. You should have seen me thrash around the room and gasp, hand on forehead, explain to everybody, “I’m a writer, and I’m suffering from writer’s block.” Most writers don’t have writer’s block, they’re suffering from writer’s block.
So, I came to this college. I was in a class with an amazing writer and professor who was teaching creative writing. And she goes, “I don’t believe in writer’s block. Writer’s block is a cop out.” Of course, she had just taken away my best, most dramatic excuse for not writing, so I was horrified. I came home to my then-girlfriend, now-wife, and I said some such nonsense that in the end all came down to, “But I get to say I have writer’s block, because otherwise I have to write.” Buried my face in her neck. She hugged me and properly patted me on the back. And everything was cool until we got married. Then the whole fucking thing fell apart.
She’s a graphic designer. Art is her life. When we started living together, she had left the firm she was with and she was working at home as a freelance graphic designer. She didn’t so much say it, but it became apparent that her job was to be creative. She worked by the hour. She worked by the project. She fed me. Because I’m disabled, I wasn’t able to work at the time, so she’s feeding me. Lights have to stay on. Heat when it’s cold, cold when it’s hot. She’s creative, she’s an artist. I think you can see where I’m going. She’s in a creative field, she can’t just swing in the air on the whim of inspiration. When she sits down, she has to work, and there’s deadlines.
Took me a few years, but I figured it out. And here’s the secret, and here’s your damnation. It’s not good enough to say you have writer’s block. That’s not good enough. You have assignments due. You’re gonna have deadlines. The profession of writing is not something you can do when you feel like it.
Now I wasn’t happy with the word my professor used so many years ago, “cop out”. Cop out is a word used to describe what students do when they come to their professor with the excuse of writer’s block. It’s a cop out. That’s not how I see it at all. I think the term I would use is dangerous. It’s dangerous to your families, to your children, your spouse. It’s dangerous to start believing in writer’s block. Because if you can allow yourself to fall into a pit with a sympathetic definition like writer’s block, then they’ll be no cold when it’s hot. There’ll be no food on the table, and then you really will suffer.
So for this class, I’m going to use this analogy. Your head is constantly filled with the gas of imagination. It’s just the way you were built. In that gas hovers the particles of creativity. The gas is flammable. The fire it creates is the work that you do and the art that you do. But sometimes that flame will go out. It just depends on the kind of day you’ve had, the kind of week you’ve had, the kind of month you’ve had, the things that are getting in your way, distractions. So right now I’m gonna teach you how to slide a lit match up your nose and set your gas on fire.
Everything you write does not need to be inspired. But everything you write will inspire you. That inspiration will start slowly. It’ll start as just a crack, just a pop as you shove your match up your nose. But it is coming. So sit down at your computer, or wherever you work, and pretend that you’re the character played by Will Ferrell in the movie Elf.
This is a perfect, well-written, perfectly performed piece. And this right here is the destruction of writer’s block. Buddy has no idea what he’s going to sing to his dad. He has no idea what he’s going to sing. That’s you with “writer’s block”. So he starts, “you’re my dad, and I’m singing, and he wants me to sing a song,” and he just says a bunch of nonsense. But then guess what. He is finally inspired and he gets to say the words he’s been wanting to say to his dad since he left the North Pole. He’s gone from punching his way through writer’s block to an inspired moment with his father when he yells, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” In this scene, writer’s block is being played out perfectly.
So this is what I do. I sit down, I start writing about the room. I start writing about the faces of the pictures in the room. I don’t write about the day that I’ve had. That’s a journal entry. I write about what I’m actually going through at that moment. I don’t say, “My wife poured me a whiskey when I came into the room to write this curriculum today, because I had a terrible and emotional day, and just wasn’t going to be able to handle it.” I don’t write any of that. That’s journal entry stuff.
What I do write is things like, “Our chihuahua mix is laying in a box right now lined with my wife’s favorite robe. She doesn’t get to wear that robe anymore because his box is more important. My Rottweiler Sadie keeps staring at me from across the room. Just keeps looking at me, and it reminds me of that part in the book by Jack London called the Call of the Wild, where Buck has been rescued by a merchant, and he sits across the room. He won’t sit at the man’s feet, he’s got too much pride. But he sits across the room and just looks at the man and gets happiness from that.”
To start a fire, that was a Jack London. That was a different Jack London story. That was a short. It’s about a man in the Yukon during the Gold Rush. He’s dying of frost out in the wilderness, and all he needs to do is start a fire. Everything’s covered in snow. All he needed was a match to shove up his nose. You know who taught me about start a fire was Liechen. Liechen taught me about Start a Fire. Liechen taught me about Jack London.
What did he say before he played the video of the short film? “I’ve never played this for a class before, but I think this year I will. I think this guy just needs to start a fire.” And he looked at me, Liechen looked me dead in the eye. He turned off the lights in the class, and everyone watched. I watched from the back of the room. He came and stood next to me. And he said, “How am I gonna start you on fire?”
I looked at him and said, “I’m already on fire. I’m just not screaming yet.”
“Yet?” he said. “You’re running out of time, Jesse. It’s time to start screaming.”
I looked at him and said, “I scream every day. I scream into my pillow and I pound on my mattress.” If I had writer’s block, and I had written what I wrote just now, from a chihuahua in a box on through to Sadie on the couch, Jack London, To Start a Fire, and Liechen, I would be writing.
Writers are writers by nature. What you need to really make a writer, and not all writers are made of this, but what you really need to make a writer is a mixing bowl. You toss in an introvert. You toss in a love of stories, maybe somebody in their past was a great storyteller. And you toss in a love of books. Mix all that together, douse it in gasoline and set it on fire. Stomp it out with a work boot and bury it.
For me, you bury it for ten years, some of you it’s longer, some shorter. You dig it up and you toss it in a frying pan with a bit of grease rendered off the fat of their experiences. Fry the whole thing, toss it in the corner, and if you ignore it, it’ll start spitting books at you, spitting short stories, spitting poems. It’ll start to spit screenplays, graffiti, essays. That’s mostly how you make a writer. There’s other ways but that’s a really good way to do it. But a lot of writers, you just dig them up and throw them in a corner and they’ll ooze stories at you. You gotta render that fat, you gotta fry this thing up if you really want it to start throwing out work when you toss it in the corner. That’s what we’re doing here, frying the writer we just dug up.
Writers, and I’m not saying this about you, but writers as a tribe are lazy. Just a fact. They hide behind chores and research and the internet, social media, movies. They use excuses like inspiration, writer’s block, which we’re talking about now. I even tried to inspire one writer online to get to work and he said he was letting his thoughts and his inspiration age like a fine vintage.
I am not friends with him, I don’t need that in my life. I would tell you to go look him up but he’s never published anything and he probably never will.
Writers as a tribe are lazy. But really, are they? Or are they just scared to death? Because I was scared to death. How many of you are scared? What I learned by watching my wife is that sitting in front of a blank screen and pounding out words is a whole lot less scary than opening a refrigerator that’s empty. And now I’m writing about Liechen. I title it “Liechen’s War 1,” leads to “Liechen’s War 2,” leads to “Malice”. In the scenario I just built for you, I had a bad day full of distractions and emotional turmoil. I started talking about what was around me, and it led me to what I was going to write. Led me to about 25-30 pages of deeply emotional, important work that talks about parenting, teaching, the pain of the gifted child. Violence and murder. And I worked my way there slowly.
It’s called freewriting. You’ve all heard of it. Maybe you haven’t. It is just where you write what’s happening around you, and what comes to mind based on it, until you’re into your story. It’s a powerful tool. It was taught to me by Charlotte Hegg, my ninth grade English teacher. She gave me an assignment once that led to a short story about — see I’m doing it again.
You can do this kind of thing in conversation with a friend or loved one, or somebody on a subway. You can do this with yourself as you’re walking down the street. You can do this with a piece of paper in your car when you’re about to go into the grocery store with a perfectly written grocery list. Freewriting does not need to be freewriting. Freewriting is a lifestyle.
If you use freewriting as a tool to get through a specific short story, it’s like going on the Keto diet until you lose 40 pounds. Happy with your life, you stop the Keto diet, and you gain it all back the next time you have to write a short story, or God help you, a novel. But if you make freewriting a way of life, then it’s always there. You’re speaking your thoughts, you’re thinking about Sadie the Rottweiler.
She’s a locomotive, and attached to her is the train car of Buck, and attached to Buck is the train car of To Start a Fire, and attached to the train car of To Start a Fire, is the passenger car where you sit down with Liechen, and you talk it all out. Freewriting is a way of thinking from one moment to the next, and it always leads to some kind of inspiration. I do it all day every day. Conversation with my wife, conversation on the internet, it all goes from one topic to the next topic and on to a different topic that leads to the topic.
I started freewriting when I was three, when my Romani grandmother told me I was going to be the storyteller of her tribe. I’ll be freewriting when I walk out of this room, and you better believe that I’ll freewrite about what happened here when I talk to my wife tonight. It’s all about storytelling. It’s all about constant storytelling to discover the world around you and the world within you. And I can sit down and write any time I want to. And that’s one tool. We could sit here for the rest of the night and into the next morning, as I name off one way after the next to walk you away from this legend of writer’s block. And at the end of all of my examples, you’re gonna pull out a box of matches. You’re gonna slide it open, slide it closed, strike that sulfur on that hard strip on the side, and you’re gonna stuff that lit match up your nose. Your head’s gonna burst into flames, and you’re gonna start writing. I could do it over and over again.
Sensory Input
Steven Pressfield’s Boots
Steven Pressfield wrote a book called The War of Art. It’s pretty short. It’s pretty amazing. There’s a character in my autobiography named Big Sister bought it for me. Steven Pressfield’s a pretty famous international best-selling author. He was talking about his day and he said he has a few things he does every day, before and after he writes, but one of them is he puts on a pair of boots. They’re work boots. I picture them as brown and scuffed. With all the words he’s written, and books he’s written, they have to be scuffed, right? Well, he wears them the entire time he’s writing. His entire work day, he’s wearing these boots. Then he walks out the back door of his house, across the yard, looks out into the woods. I’m pretty sure that’s what he does. Takes a minute, becomes a man again.
He’s not a man when he’s writing. It’s been eight years since I read War of Art, so I might have that part wrong, but it works for my lecture. It reads good and it’s a good story, so I think Steven Pressfield would approve. Just, when you’re a famous writer, and you’re at some writing convention, and you sit down to talk to Steven Pressfield about becoming a man again, just tell him Jesse Teller might have misquoted him. And if he has a problem with being misquoted, I understand. He may challenge me to a duel. Pistols or sabres. As the challenger, I’m gonna choose sabres. Tell him no doubt he’ll beat Jesse Teller in sabres, because they’re very shiny, and sometimes I get distracted by shiny things. But tell him that if I skip over pistols and I skip over sabres and I go to pocket knives, tell Steven Pressfield to work it out some other way. Few and far between are the people that can beat me in pocket knives. Tell him to come to my house. We’ll talk about it over a scotch. Anyway, Steven Pressfield walks to the edge of his yard because he needs to become a man again. I’ve said my piece, I’ve counted to three.
Jesse Teller’s videos and clacking keyboard
I don’t know how to type. I never really learned the technical way to do it. I type with the thumb, J, K, on my right hand, and F, D, S on my left. You guys have seen me, and I warned you in the first class, not to mistake anger with passion. Well, passionate everywhere except my wife’s arms, turns into this kind of onslaught and I pound it. I don’t tap the keys. A lot of you do, if you do, you should. Every key stroke is a statement.
Well, I was buying keyboards that were Microsoft keyboards, they were about $20 a piece. And pretty soon one of the letters would stop working, and the letter had worn off of the key, so I didn’t know what I was looking at. As a man who doesn’t know how to type, looking at the keyboard is pretty essential. And I just, I had to buy another keyboard. This happened a couple times, and then I started writing the book Eastgate. That’s a working title, don’t quote me.
About 200 pages in, I had to buy a new keyboard. About 400 pages later, I had to buy another, and I realized I was too hard on keyboards. I needed a keyboard that could withstand the onslaught of the passion I was using to write my work. So I started doing research on keyboards and I found out too much. I’m not gonna go into what kinds of different keyboards there are. You don’t need me to waste our time telling you about brown switches, green switches, blue switches, and red switches, and exactly how each color gives you an entirely different typing experience. You don’t need to know that I tried green but red was always gonna be my choice and I had to return that green-switch keyboard.
See, keyboards belong to computers and computers belong to geniuses like Gates and Jobs, and they think differently than I do. It’s possible they think differently than you do. So they break it all down, every switch and how the key is going to work. Because they understand people like us, our fingers all move differently on the keys. And some “boards” as I call them, just don’t work. I’m not gonna tell you all that. I’m not gonna waste our time talking about keyboards and colors, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs do not belong in all this, so I promise I will not waste your time with that. That would be criminal.
But the kind I had been using was quiet, because it had just a little bubble under the key. You depress the bubble, which was like a plastic membrane. You depress the bubble and the key is hit. It pops up on your screen like magic. And then there was a different kind of keyboard. There was a type of keyboard called a mechanical keyboard. Rainbow of colors, but I promised I wouldn’t get into it, so let’s move on. And this, the key had a spring under it. It sprang back into place after being depressed.
I ended up buying a Deck. I’m not here to trash talk the Deck company. I will just say that I wrote 40,000 words on my Microsoft keyboard before I needed to buy another one. At this point we realized that in the span of one epic-length novel, I had burned through two keyboards. And with the vision I had for the novel I was working on, I was going to do at least one more. By now in my career, I had already bought two other keyboards. Each keyboard was $20. That’s $200 already I’ve spent on keyboards, and there’s going to be another $20 before this book is done. I’m starting to realize now that this book is going to be about 900 pages, and it’s one of seven. I’m not doing that math. You guys feel free to do that math if you want to. I’m not doing that math.
I bought a Deck. And I wrote 1.4 million words on my Deck before I needed to replace it. I like the keys, so I took them off and kept them. The keys on a Deck have a black inside bottom, or inside top, however you want to talk about it, and the letter is scratched out, and a light shined through. The letter isn’t even on the surface of the key. It’s carved on the inside of the key with the light shining through. It’s about a quarter inch plastic. Imagine how many times I’d have to strike the same key too slowly, one drip of water through a mountain my way, through that key to erase that letter. These keys were permanent. Like I said, I took them all off and kept them.
Every time I buy a new keyboard, I get a mechanical. I always put the keys from my original Deck onto the new keyboard, because I’ll never buy a Deck again. I bought my first Deck in 2010. I still have the keys in 2022. So, I’m not trash talking Deck. They hooked me up, and I’m not gonna say the rest. When I decided to get my finger tats, I used the font from my Deck keys. So when I look down at these hands, I actually see the font of the keyboard that I use. Because I’ve replaced my keyboard two times since. And every time, I take the keys off and put my Deck keys on.
Mechanical keyboards are loud. This is what I was getting to in the beginning. In order to get here, we had to wind our way through the working title Eastgate, Steve Jobs, a sabre duel with Pressfield, and the rainbow, bubbles, springs, finger tattoos, fonts, millions of words, and now we’re here.
Pavlov’s dog
If you do an activity with the same stimuli around you, your brain will say “Oh, we’re doing this now,” and slip into the activity. That is what happens with creativity.
Picasso said inspiration comes while you’re working. The way you train your mind to create is by teaching it the sound of the bell and when it’s supposed to salivate. Mechanical keyboards are loud. They’re usually gamer keyboards. My friend was a gamer. He had a Deck, said his wife finally made him get a different keyboard altogether, because he was playing while she was trying to sleep. Mechanical keyboards are loud. They’re unmistakable. They have been since the Commodore 64.
So my keyboard has a loud clack. Unmistakable, like a powerful businesswoman stomping across a linoleum floor on her way to fire an asshole manager. My keyboard clacked like her high heel shoes.
At first it was distracting, I knew I had to push past that. And then I was oblivious to it. I thought I was fine. And then I reached a point where the clacking of the keys themselves was the Pavlov’s dog bell that told my mind, “We’re writing now,” shoved a match up my nose, lit my mind on fire, and as the Joker says, and here we go.
Heath Ledger, we’re at the final scenes now. The biggest, meanest prisoner asks for the detonator and he says, “Give it to me, and I’ll do what you should have done 10 minutes ago.” That’s the voice of your procrastination. We’ll get there. I promise you, we will get there.
But for now, Batman’s been hit and he’s dazed and his mechanical eyes aren’t working. Lucious Fox says, “Standby.” Blank screen. This is the moment when the writer’s block is lying to you, because writer’s block is not a big, black cube like we always picture it is, like I always pictured it was. Writer’s block is a man selling snake oil in the west, where people are dealing with cholera and yellow fever, and he’s got a bottle of tonic. That’s your writer’s block, so as Lucious Fox says, standby.
I’m sorry, folks. You can’t be Batman today. Your mechanical eyes aren’t working. All the things you’ve been taught about how to make yourself write, they’re not working. With me it was when the Joker had me on my back, I’m pounding on my mechanical keyboard. I’ve written about 120,000 words on it. And I hear Heath Ledger say, “And Here We Go.” And that’s when I realize that the sound of the keyboard was enough. And why shouldn’t it be? 120,000 words. All other writers pay attention to the words. I’ve learned not to pay attention to the words.
I’ve written 6.7 million words. In this lecture, you’re gonna hear me say that number over and over again. Bear with me. I’m not proud of the words. I’m proud of the spaces. I was talking to my wife the other day. We were talking about the 6.7 million words that I’ve written. And I said, I’m a blue collar writer. She’s heard me say this before, but I was never able to really capture it. Like always, I’ve been freewriting, and I hadn’t gotten to Liechen’s War yet. And I said the blue collar worker in me is not in the words. The blue collar worker in me is in the space bar. The artist in me lives in the words. But if I’ve written 6.7 million words, I’ve hit that space bar 6.7 million times.
Now I’m going to let you guys theorize over whether it’s the clack of the keys that create the words of my work, that is the sensory input that tells me, we’re doing this now. Or if it is the constant finality that the space bar gives, the gavel of the judge, the slam of the door, the fist of the space bar for that word and on to the next.
Let me tell you people the art and the scholar of your work lives in the keys that you type. But the blue collar worker slaps the space bar. I told my wife, I’m proud of the 6.7 million words I’ve written, but I’m more proud of the 6.7 million spaces. And that right there is the sound that inspires me to write the rest. It’s that space bar. And I hit it hard. So much harder than the rest of my keys.
The space bar. Once I hear that space bar hit a couple of times, I’m in the work. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a blue collar family, and I know that without the blue collar workers of America, the whole nation comes to a grinding halt. Maybe it’s because I grew up working class and work was just part of life, day in, day out. But that working class space bar. In that space bar is the trucker that brings everybody their goods. In that space bar is the register that they work at your favorite convenience store. In that space bar is the guy who changes your oil. It’s in the guy that mops the halls of this school.
That space bar, that space bar is home for me. And it inspires me to write the rest of the words. When I hit that space bar, Heath Ledger hears me, and he says, “And Here We Go.” That’s my Pavlov. And I begin to salivate, and devour my work.
You can train yourself to be creative on command.
I’m anti coffee house, anti restaurant
Unpredictability
Okay so I’m in Creative Writing 201, I’m taking it extremely seriously, as seriously as I possibly can. One of the assignments is a journal I have to write in every week. Of course I’m an undergrad, so I don’t take it seriously. I told you I was taking Creative Writing 201 as seriously as I could. So I don’t take it seriously. I see the deadline coming. She says it’s due. My brilliant writing professor says it’s due at the end of the semester. One journal entry a week.
And on it goes, and on it goes, and I don’t write my journal entries. Right here I could say that my wife would tell me and she would tell all of you, that I had good reason for it. Day before the end of the semester, absolute due date, 4 o’clock in the afternoon, evening? I’m an undergraduate, so it’s afternoon. And I’m sitting in front of a blank notebook. It’s a very cool notebook. Canvas and cardboard. And big, huge, thick, spirals holding all the thick white paper together. It’s gorgeous. And empty. And now I have until midnight to write an entry per week. I think that’s 16 weeks. I’m in George’s Café, which I absolutely love. Get the fried mushrooms. I’m in George’s Café. Do what John Mulaney says and get an order of fries for the table. This is where I decide to cram.
So, let’s talk about it real quick. Not everybody at my table is in this writing class. All three of the other people in this booth are here to socialize. At one point, a person I’m friends with at a different booth is yelled at, his entire booth is yelled at, by a violent drunk. I make eye contact with my friend because I have to, to see if he needs my help. He doesn’t. And right there, that right there, that’s my point. I’m trying to write good enough work that I get an A in this class. And here I am, I have put myself in a position where I might have to walk away from my journal and get in a fight with a drunk monster the day before my journal is due.
Best case scenario, the fight takes five minutes, in comes the 911 call, here comes cops, they have to take a statement, EMT, they have to hear what I did to him and why. He’s carried away. We’re still in best case, the cops let me go back to my table, which they wouldn’t, but we’re playing in the best case.
Hours have gone by, and now I have to go back to my journal, finish the conversation where the rest of the table talks about me and the fight, and go right back to me and my thoughts and my feelings about losing my soulmate. Do you see the problem here? I had locked eyes with my friend. He shook his head. I nodded. A big burst turns out to be nothing. And I go back to my writing, but it takes me, of course, it takes me like 20 minutes to go back to my writing that I’m going to be graded on the next day. That’s a big part of my grade. And then after the scuffle, my friend walks over and sits down across from me. And we have the exchange of manly manliness.
“Hey man, I knew you would’ve been there for me.” “Yeah, man, I have your back.” “Me and my booth, we always had it under control but it means something to me that you had my back.” “Well man, you’ve proved yourself…” Here’s another half hour to 45 minutes of the two of us bumping chests. The gangland street rat in me was always going to back that guy.
But you realize now that I’ve lost, what is it, an hour and fifteen minutes, and it takes me another twenty minutes of bragging about how I had that guy’s back before I slide back into my journal where I am in the middle of writing a heartbreaking piece about Bekah, my wife, who at the time was my ex-girlfriend. And so I don’t believe in diners and restaurants and coffee houses as writing spots. Too much chest thumping. Too many drunken, aggressive idiots. And that’s not even talking about what was happening at the booth, where two of the people at the booth aren’t even in college. And the third person, the one that stole me from Bekah, only has two journal entries to write. Imagine the conversation.
Tonight, my dog Jordai is in the middle of a stretch. He’s got his front legs kicked out, chin thrown back, his whole body is trembling. He can’t move. That’s what’s happening right now as I write this curriculum. And I just described that exact same thing happening while I was trying to cram my journal. Got the journal turned in, like so many undergrads, and I hope none of you actually do. I got the journal turned in. I got an A-. I actually talked to my professor about it, because I knew I would never see her again. And she said the reason she had given me that minus, was because she knew that one of the entries, an entry called Pawn, was not new and that I had regurgitated it for my journal.
I looked at her and said, “How could you possibly know that?” She looked at me and she said, “We’ve all heard about Pawn. The English Department has heard about Pawn.” Pawn’s not the point. Pawn had only been read one time in one place. A girl on the prowl had read it in ’98 at a coffee house she worked at, at an open mic night. She’d grabbed it, read it. Everybody at the coffee house knew it wasn’t her work. She had taken the comp book behind the counter and answered no questions. That was it. Maybe 45 people had ever heard Pawn performed. But now here I am, two years later, talking to my Creative Writing professor, who’s docking me because she knows I wrote Pawn years ago. And the English Department had heard about it.
Please don’t call me cocky, but I’ll take the A-. But that’s not the point. The chest thumping is not the point. For this one time and this one time only, losing my soulmate was not the point. The point was, that drunk monster, I want to use other words but I won’t, took an hour and a half from my cram session. And it wasn’t because I wasn’t dedicated to the topic, because the topic was the loss of my soulmate, and it was all I could think of, all I could breathe. When I ate, the topic of losing my soulmate. I shat out the girl that I was dating at the time. And for this one moment, we’re going to pretend like that’s not the thing.
This is what’s important. I had put myself in an environment where it was impossible to create. So many times I did this in the early years, it’s incalculable. But none of those words did I count in my 6.7 million. I wrote under George’s Café conditions for twelve years, and produced almost nothing. A few flares, nothing serious. But when I set all that aside and chose one environment with conditions I could control, I wrote my 6.7 million. I said it before, but I’m gonna say it again. “Be regular and orderly in your life so you can be violent and original in your work.” –Gustave Flaubert
Saw a meme the other day, it had a frustrated blonde woman on it. You could tell she was frustrated by all of the parts. Eyebrows. The sneer, the fist with the pen. And the caption says, “When you come to Starbucks to get work done, but the person at the table next to you is oversharing.” I don’t have the meme right now, but I’m gonna search for it. I’m gonna dive head first into a pool of thousands of memes, and I hope I’ll come out with the perfect image like Criss Angel (This is a Criss Angel trick with the motorcycle and the playing card, maybe 2009-2011). I would say to this woman very politely everything that I’ve said to you. And when that didn’t work (because it wouldn’t work), I would tell her coffee houses and restaurants are terrible places to get work done. I would tell her remember that time when I was cramming for that journal and that guy wanted to fight my friend and… I would tell her find an environment you have complete control over. And then get to work.
Because if you work in a chaotic environment, you get confusion of sensory input, zero Pavlov, zero salivating. You get confusion of theme, so much is moving around you. So many themes that it’s hard to focus on your one bit.
I was watching a show, the show doesn’t matter. Of course it matters, but I can’t remember it, I can’t find it. It’s gone. Anyway, they were talking about forgeries. Somebody had forged Abraham Lincoln’s name. And they put this device on the actual ink, bent over and looked through the device, it was some kind of magnifying glass. I have no reason to own one of these things, but I hope one day I buy one. The magnification of every stroke of every letter of Abraham’s name, it all made me think about my writing.
You get the sensory input, you hear the clacking of the keys, you can block out the short film To Start a Fire, you can block out the chihuahua in the box. You can block out Buck. You can block out Pressfield and the sabres. And you can smack away what everybody has ordered at your coffee house. And as you’re looking through that eye piece, and salivating all over that old paper, you can see your theme, your plot, thank God your characters, and you can see that your work is not a counterfeit.
Writing Assignment
I want you to write between 100-150 words of something cool, something inspired. Before you do that, I want you to tell me how you got from where you were to the inspiration enough to write it. It’s due in three class periods.
Reading Assignment
Reading Assignment for next class: “Billy Badass Part 1” and “Billy Badass Part 2” chapters from Teardrop Road
Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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