Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing-tips

  • It’s Never Been a Worse Time to Write a Book

    It’s Never Been a Worse Time to Write a Book

    Looking at Paul’s literary success—a man whose brief collection of letters has been on history’s all-time best-seller list—I can’t help but feel I bet on the wrong horse. Here I was, grinding away at novels, when I should have been an epistle-wielding scrivener, maybe even the founder of my own religion. Paul understood something I clearly did not: the world wasn’t clamoring for door stopper novels the size of The Count of Monte Cristo—it wanted sharp, incendiary tracts that could shake the foundations of belief. His instincts were dead-on, and two millennia later, his work is still in print, while my manuscripts remain in purgatory.

    And let’s be honest—there’s never been a worse time to write a book. We inhabit a post-literate wasteland, where the next generation’s idea of reading is squinting at subtitles while scrolling TikTok. The written word is being replaced by 15-second dopamine jolts, and syntax is being butchered faster than a hog in a slaughterhouse. Meanwhile, AI-generated prose is turning human creativity into an optional relic—why agonize over writing when you can plug a prompt into ChatGPT and get a grammatically competent, if soulless, 2,000-word essay faster than it takes to microwave a Hot Pocket? Argument structure, rhetorical flourish, actual thought? Who needs those when the algorithm can produce a sterile, citation-laden monstrosity with all the passion of an instruction manual? Paul saw the writing on the wall—literally. And I? I spent five decades wrestling with novels that no one wanted to read. Maybe it’s time to rethink my approach before I, too, become just another artifact of a bygone literary era.

    And yet, when you’re possessed by the writing demon, as I am, none of this matters. Reality bends around the obsession. Practical concerns slide off me like water off a duck’s back—or more accurately, like rejection letters into my trash bin. The demon doesn’t care about markets, trends, or the creeping irrelevance of books. No, the demon is hell-bent on proselytizing, convinced that I’ve stumbled upon the elixir of life, and that the world must hear my truth, whether it wants to or not. It’s not just enthusiasm—it’s derangement, the kind of fevered compulsion that outs you as a hopeless fanboy for your own ideas. People start calling you “touched” or “special,” which is just polite society’s way of saying, “You are utterly unhinged, and we wish you would stop.”

    You’re ashamed of your writing obsession, yet powerless to stop because the impulse isn’t tethered to reality—it’s pure pathology. You’re a self-appointed evangelist, convinced the world needs your message, your perspective, you. If only people would listen, if only your words took root in the collective consciousness, then maybe—just maybe—you’d finally feel the validation that’s eluded you your entire life.

    And yet, you’re no fool. You see the absurdity of your crusade. You know the odds, the futility, the sheer delusion of it all. But you’re a divided soul—the rational part watches in horror as the compulsive part keeps writing into the void, hoping someone, somewhere, will care.

  • How Eddie Murphy’s Advice Pushed Tiffany Haddish’s Career in the Right Direction

    How Eddie Murphy’s Advice Pushed Tiffany Haddish’s Career in the Right Direction

    If I was indeed possessed by a misguided writing demon in the mid-’80s—courtesy of reading A Confederacy of Dunces on repeat and subsequently squandering decades chasing a fool’s errand to capture some fraction of Toole’s novelistic splendor—then one could argue, with a certain tragic flair, that A Confederacy of Dunces ruined my life. Of course, that’s a spectacular oversimplification, but it has a nice literary ring to it, the kind of statement that cries out for a memoir deal. A perfect hook for a writing addict who, in theory, is supposed to have sworn off writing books but is secretly mainlining one on the side. It’s theatrical, adolescent, irresistibly neat. But let’s indulge the idea for a moment: a novel ruined a young man’s life. Decades later, the question remains—what do we do with this squandered life? Do we ignore it, dismiss it as a useless souvenir, or can something be salvaged from the wreckage?

    If there’s anything worth extracting from my own literary misadventures, it’s a warning to younger, equally deluded souls who might be possessed by the same demon of ambition. And make no mistake—ambition alone will not get you anywhere worth going. Yes, it will drag you through years of toil, ensure you hit your daily word count, and convince you that sheer willpower equals literary success. But ultimately, ambition alone will lead you into a tunnel with no exit. You’ll work hard—but not the right way. You’ll write, but without joy, without connection, without meaning. You will produce, but you will not matter.

    So instead of chasing the illusion of grandeur, you should be asking yourself four crucial questions. First, are you having fun with the creative process? If not, why are you doing this? The comedian Tiffany Haddish once said that Eddie Murphy pulled her aside and told her that if she wasn’t having fun on stage, the audience would sense it—and once she embraced that, her career took off. The same applies to writing. If your joy doesn’t translate onto the page, don’t expect anyone else to find it. Ambition will get words onto the page, but it won’t make them worth reading. Second, are you the only person in the world who could write this book? What unique gifts, obsessions, or quirks of personality make you the best person to write this, or are you forcing an idea simply because you think it’s marketable? If the demon of ambition is blinding you to your weaknesses, rest assured that agents and editors will see them clearly—and they will tell you to go home. The demon, of course, won’t listen. He never does.

    Third, why this book? Can you articulate—persuasively—why your book matters? Will it survive in an attention economy where a two-minute TikTok can go viral while your ten-year opus sells six copies? Do you know what your book is competing against? Can you justify its existence? 

    Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve never been published and have no social media following to catapult your debut novel into relevance. How exactly do you think this book is going to survive? Picture a horde of baby sea turtles, freshly hatched, flopping their way toward the ocean. Before they even touch the surf, they’re picked off by seagulls, crabs, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, frigatebirds, herons, egrets, snappers, jacks, barracudas, dolphins, sharks—the list of assassins is endless. The ones that do make it into open water face even worse odds. And yet, statistically, they still have a better shot at survival than your novel has at flourishing into a living, breathing piece of art that embeds itself in millions of imaginations.

    So before you get too deep into your literary fever dream, you need to ask yourself a sobering question: Is there enough juice for the squeeze? Best-selling author Sam Harris certainly asked himself that before shifting his focus away from books to his wildly successful Making Sense podcast. I remember him breaking it down with ruthless efficiency: writing a book can take five grueling years—writing, editing, publishing, book tours—and even after all that, sales might not justify the effort. Meanwhile, he can record a podcast in a few hours and reach millions instantly. No torturous rewrites, no endless editing loops, no begging the world to care.

    And that’s a best-selling author speaking. You’re not one. You’re a nobody with a dream, convinced that your fragile little hatchling of a book will somehow defy the gauntlet and fulfill your delusions of literary immortality. You have lost your mind. More than likely, the book won’t be read. Which brings us to your final, painful reckoning.

    Will your book actually connect with anyone? Or will it be yet another tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it? Failure to connect isn’t bad luck—it’s bad writing. If your prose exists in a silo of delirious echoes, unread and unloved, then it isn’t literature—it’s literary vapor, ghostly and weightless, doomed to drift into oblivion. And here’s the cruelest truth of all: your writing demon won’t make this distinction. He’ll tell you that writing is writing, that piling up pages is progress, that if you just keep going, success is inevitable.

    It isn’t.

    Had I asked myself these questions before chasing my writing demon down every blind alley, perhaps I would have written with purpose instead of compulsion. But I was too busy obeying the demon to pause and think. If you’re an aspiring writer, don’t make the same mistake. Ambition can drive you forward, but only if it’s tethered to something real—joy, originality, necessity, and connection. Otherwise, you’re just manufacturing words, filling pages with the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.