How To Write Nonsense

You watch the new Bachelorette with your sister and feel kind of offended that something that’s intended to to empower a woman has been flipped in order to give the men decision power. It’s frustrating, but still entertaining, in the best trash-TV way. You sit there and shamelessly Google and chat about the contestants. 

A tiny bug crawls across the screen of your laptop as you’re watching Netflix in bed. You brush your finger over it and the bug is so small that it dies instantly, smearing a tiny little line of guts across your screen. The line is there, but it’s almost too small to clean up. You wipe your finger on your bed and move on with your life, and the thought crosses your mind:How ‘big’ does death need to be before you decide you need to clean it up? An ant? A mouse? An abortion? You are certainly pro-choice, and this concept is a little dark….but still something to think about. 

You start taking screen shots of your Podcasts so that you can go back and collect quotes later from the parts you like. You don’t want to forget things and you fear there isn’t enough room in your brain. You think maybe you’d like to be a cyborg, with digital memory. Or at least get an Apple Watch. 

You become frustrated thinking about all the books you want to read but feel you don’t have time for. And what about the books you don’t even know you want to read? You think about those too. You want to remember all the quotes and gain all the perspective and collect all the vocabulary. You think back to your high school Honors English classes and decide they were actually really cool. Read To Kill a Mockingbird and then act out some scenes fromRomeo & Juliet? Pretty dope.  

You turn twenty-six next Wednesday and you realize that you’ve never been in an office on your actual birthday. You were either in college, or at a music festival, or took the day off like a fucking princess. It makes you feel old, in a good way, to be working on your birthday. 

You request some time off work and start to plan your summer trips with more detail. You think about what you want your body to look like in a bikini. You think about how you want to feel. You think about tequila. 

You see a preview for Paper Towns and read the entire synopsis of the book on Wikipedia. You still thing John Green is a little weird, but you understand that his writing is a business and his fiction has a formula and these things start to become easy after a while. Just like authors who’ve written 200 romance novels. 

You know your writing has begun to have a formula. You don’t want to mass produce and lose your voice. You want a theme, and a pattern. You want a beginning, middle, and end. 

You keep writing. 

“You send a lot of e-mails. You read a lot. You write - yes, of course, but that’s now how you spend most of your time, frankly. You go on Twitter. You read things you wish you’d written. You read things you’d never want your byline on. You read cereal boxes.” -Abby Norman