How To Be a Writer in Any Time

Dear Reader,

     I wish I could have been a writer in a past era. I feel like for a while writing actually mattered and everyone knew who all the big talents were and any piece of paper with writing on it counted as money. You could travel around the world and if you said you were a writer, people would let you sleep in their barn and name their animals, and if you killed their priest, you became the new priest! Even if literacy wasn't your thing, folks in the bygone days at least used to pretend to read in public; it's a great way to avoid socializing with others while still peeking at them like a creep.

     These days writing is just coming up with good headlines for people to skim while they pretend to do research for an internet argument. Today people hate words, and they only want to dryly smile at pictures of celebrities re-purposed as depression memes. Even pooping, a built-in reading period for people, is now just a time to get more germs on your phone.

     In our era it's harder to do anything, so I've been feeling hopeless and reading up on my ancestors, who were mostly famous writers. I even found some personal histories and advice these writers had left for the benefit of future generations. I decided to spare you all their fancy word construction and break it down into easy step-by-step formulas for achieving literary success. Hopefully these steps will give you some perspective on the art of writing throughout the ages and show you how simple it used to be.

Primordial Ooze Era:

1. Emerge.
2. Feed.
3. Turn into a new color.
4. Replicate.

Caveman Era:

1. Dream of a new understanding that speaks through you.
2. Draw a symbol that illuminates a hidden flower of the mind.
3. Record the symbol in a place of magic and timelessness.
4. Die, content and whole, with a whisper for the eons.

Bronze Age:

1. Get born into the aristocratic class and show confidence in counting and animal sacrifice.
2. Spend your days agreeing with the king and pressing a stamp into bricks of clay so he knows the numbers of sheep and grain and bricks of clay he possesses.
3. Preserve a traveling legend by continuing an oral tradition through generations until writing gets more developed.
4. Bore future schoolchildren.
5. Get portrayed in a big dumb movie by someone with breathtaking abs.

Ancient Greece:

1. Live in a giant sea shell in the market square and yell at merchants about reality.
2. Found a school that studies a particle you invented.
3. Travel to Egypt to steal their coolest ideas.
4. Donate a ragged treatise carved on goatskin to the library of Alexandria, to be lost forever.
5. Float around Wikipedia as a name with almost no info attached.

Medieval Times:

1. Receive a boon of education from the church.
2. Trace an idea in your mind for twenty years as you labor ceaselessly at a harsh craft.
3. Pine for an unreachable love.
4. Get banished.
5. Send a beautiful letter to a rich person.

The Renaissance:

1. Find a mad patron dying of gout.
2. Make up how logic works.
3. Fuck with alchemy.
4. Somehow advance Western thought for the betterment of humanity.

Colonial Era:

1. Go somewhere subjected for your approval.
2. Throw yourself into an abyss of drugs and disease.
3. Collect a dazzling and misunderstood folk tale.
4. Buckle up the swashes and add a heaving bosom or two.
5. Throw some Christianity in there.
6. Find the most racist illustrator available.

World War 1:

1. Study agonizingly boring texts while the schoolmaster hits you.

2. Discover sex through a hideous cartoon manual for men and start repressing.
3. Run off to join the jolly old war.
4. Discover war is bad, and write home to tell them the news.
5. Sell long-form rhyming poetry about atrocity during a world-wide economic depression.
6. Become a schoolmaster and hit children when they remind you of your war friends.

Modern Era:

1. Be cruel to a woman; push her until she breaks.
2. Throw yourself into an abyss of drugs and sports.
3. Write about the disagreement with the woman, but make yourself a soldier or a doctor or something.
4. Publish the story to acquire wealth and new women.
5. Kill yourself.

Post-Modern Era:

1. Find a fiery, self-aggrandizing group of artistic riff-raff.
2. Pick a cool name together and reject all other human knowledge.
3. Use the media to spit in society's face and receive massive critical acclaim.
4. Decide you're apolitical, or secretly embrace fascism.
5. Still alive? Retire to exotic locale and claim everything was your idea.

The Present:

1. Feed sad people lies about their suffering, and say mean things on the internet to the celebrities of the opposition.
2. Get the call-up for some mostly symbolic government position and look the other way while terrible things happen.
3. Write a book on how you were right about everything.
4. Get a podcast so you can sell t-shirts and mugs promoting inside jokes.

Future Era:

1. Leave hidden resistance communiques as you flee fascist robo-soldiers.
2. Invent a spray paint can that melts enemies' faces off when you graffiti them.
3. Travel back in time to rehash 2016 yet again.
4. Make positive hip-hop in an underground city of anarchist cyborgs.

     Keep in mind that if you are able to time-travel into any of these parts of the past and follow the easy steps, they still might not work for you. I can only provide a general illustration of what I remember these guys probably said. Keep in mind my whole family has always been rich, white, landowning males (even before race and land ownership were made up), and this possibly could have helped in our achievements. Please remember that literary success is measured in a variety of ways, most significantly that after you are dead, people who seem smart say that you were special.