On Writing Like a Motherfucker

Dear Sugar, at the Rumpus, is my favorite advice columnist. Her words pierce right to the heart of me almost every time, and I find myself turned inside out with longing to write the way she does, with heart and humor and clarity.

Her column that spawned coffee cups and a Facebook page of its very own is Dear Sugar #48. If you haven't read it, you totally should:

"At the time, I believed that I’d wasted my twenties by not having come out of them with a finished book and I bitterly lambasted myself for that. I thought a lot of the same things about myself that you do, Elissa Bassist. That I was lazy and lame. That even though I had the story in me, I didn’t have it in me to see it to fruition, to actually get it out of my body and onto the page, to write, as you say, with 'intelligence and heart and lengthiness.' But I’d finally reached a point where the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a book that sucked. And so at last, I got to serious work on the book."


Right on, sister.  Write like a motherfucker.