By Me, To Me, About Me, For You…
(I’ve been asked by a few folks how it feels like to live inside of my own head)
Here’s a monologue of the type of shit that I write when I need to just write and honestly it just feels like I’m talking to myself.
Grab some whiskey or tea or both and enjoy.
We need to talk.
You’ve been phoning it in. I know it. You know it. The words know it. You’ve been reaching for the same tired, beat-to-hell swear words like a toddler grabbing the same crayon. Funny, it’s always the red one. Especially when there’s a whole box of sixty four sitting right there.
You’re a writer.
Act like it. “But I already swear,” you say. Yeah. You do.
You drop an F bomb with all the creativity of a man ordering the same sandwich for thirty years. Turkey on white. No mustard. Hold the audacity.
No. NO.
Swear words are tools. They’re not garnish. They’re not the parsley on the side of the plate that nobody eats. They are the goddamn cast iron skillet. And you can cook with a skillet, or you can hit someone in the face with it.
Both are valid.
But you have to surprise people with the skillet.
Call someone a “piece of fuck.”
Just, just sit with that for a second. Let it breathe. Roll it around on your tongue like a sommelier with a wine that’s gone terribly, beautifully wrong. A piece of fuck. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t HAVE to make sense. It makes you feel something. It lands in the ear like a bird flying into a window (BONK) sudden, startling, oddly fascinating. You can’t look away. You can’t un-hear it.
That’s the power.
That’s the MAGIC.
Tell someone to go shit themselves. Not “go shit on something.” Not the expected preposition. Not the comfortable grammatical trajectory your brain was already riding like a lazy river. No. You yank the tube out from under them. Go shit yourself. It’s wrong. It’s beautiful. It’s a linguistic sucker punch that rewires the whole sentence in the reader’s skull.
“But what about the rules of… “
I’mma stop you right there.
You’re a writer. THE RULES ARE A BUFFET. You take what you want. You leave the sneeze guarded Jell-O salad of conventional syntax on the tray if it doesn’t serve you. You are not beholden to the expected architecture of an expletive. You are a BUILDER. You are a DESTROYER. You are a foulmouthed god in a bathrobe at 2 AM, and the language is your clay.
Mould it.
Twist it.
Make it into something nobody’s seen before, something that makes a reader stop mid sentence and go, “Wait! Can you DO that with those words?”
YES. YOU CAN.
You can do whatever you want. That’s the whole point of this thing we call writing. You didn’t sign up for this gig, this barely paying, sanity eroding, talking-to-yourself-in-a-dark-room profession so you could colour inside the lines. You signed up because something in you is broken in exactly the right way, and the fracture lets the weird light through.
So keep the swears potent.
Keep them unexpected.
Rotate your stock. Freshen the produce. Don’t let your profanity get stale on the shelf like gas station sushi. Nobody wants gas station sushi. Nobody wants a swear word they can see coming from three paragraphs away.
Be the writer who makes other writers go, “Oh, you absolute cathedral of ass.”
Be the writer who types something so gloriously, creatively vulgar that your spell checker files a restraining order or grammarly shits its own pants.
Keep the magic alive.
Now get back to work.
We’ve got words to ruin.
Stephen Walker.
P.S. I’ve had a few sour beers and I’ll be hammering away at the keyboard until the birds start waking up.