Write in the Kisser

From time to time people ask me, “Trevor, how do you manage to come up with such relentlessly hilarious updates on a basis more regular than my bowel movements after eating prunes for a week?” When this question arises, it is my tendency to look at the asker, shrug, and say, “STOP RUBBING MY SHOULDERS YOU PERVERT! WHY THE HELL ARE YOU EVEN TALKING TO ME?! I’VE NEVER SEEN YOU BEFORE IN MY LIFE! CAN’T A GUY RIDE THE SUBWAY IN PEACE ANYMORE?!?“

Once I’ve gotten a hold of myself though, and finished scrubbing my entire body with antibacterial hand gel, I do my best to answer the question.

“Uhh, come again?”

As you can see, the whole process is fraught with inefficiency. That’s why I came up with the following handy dandy¹ guide, in order to show you, my Faith Hill fans, the inner workings of the mind of your average writer during the, ahem², creative process.

Step 1: Coming up with the most brilliant idea ever.

Step 2: Realizing that only a much better writer than yourself could ever hope to implement said idea in a manner befitting its brilliance.

Step 3: Deciding that any better writer probably already has his or her own brilliant ideas — all of which are much better than yours, incidentally — so you might as well go ahead and see if you can’t make something out of your still-promising premise.

Step 4: Spending untold hours, days, weeks, months, or years crafting and pruning your idea just so until it becomes almost perfectly aligned with the vision in your head at conception.

Step 5: Rereading your recently completed opus and nearly gagging on the putrid obtuseness with which you have rendered your once brilliant but now utterly desecrated idea.

Step 6: Spending additional untold hours, days, weeks, months, or years tweaking and revising the aforementioned “putrid obtuseness” until every last comma, em dash, and umlaut is objectively and undeniably perfect and you know for a fact that it would be impossible for anyone to say otherwise, for this really is the greatest thing you, personally, have ever written, and perhaps the greatest thing ever written by anybody, anywhere, ever.

Step 7: Basking in the glory of a job well done and anticipating the moment when publishers scramble over themselves to be the first to make you an offer for a ludicrous sum of money³ while critics heap sheaves of adoring praise on advance copies of your work and agents fight to the death for the honor of booking you on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Step 8: Rereading the finished product after spending some time away from it and realizing you were right the first time about how hard it sucked and how far away this monumental piece of shit is from your original intention.

Step 9: Coming up with another idea so brilliant that it’s going to make your first idea look like an idea proposed by some writer who, uhhh, well, just isn’t as good as you — a writer who is so much not as good as you, in fact, that, by comparison, he is like you from Step 2 and you, in turn, are like that “better writer” (he with his own brilliant ideas), even though you are, in fact, the same person you were when that first idea turned out like crap, so why are you even bothering this time, you hopeless loser?

Step 10: Repeat steps 1 through 9 ad infinitum until death or glory is yours for the taking.  (Hint: Don’t bet on the latter.)

_________________
1. More “dandy” than “handy,” really.
2. Sorry, frog in my throat.
3. Euros, preferably.