How to Respectfully Follow That Writer Online

 

1.    Carefully, and with quiet, plodding steps…assuming that a person can plod quietly.

2.  Use a horrific impression of the Lone Ranger.

3.   You might draw a twelve-month calendar of seahorses by hand, at which that author you love might look back as he hurries away from you.

4.  Stuff your gullet with white chocolate baking chips.

5.   Read some Hemingway.

6.  Check out Rachel Cohn.

7.   Fall in love with the quality of a celebrity profile they once wrote and save their website to your browser’s favorites under the heading, “…got drunk and flirted with Chris Evans, a.k.a. My Heroine”

8.  Your Twitter profile simply reads, “They Call Me Orange Joe”.

9.  Immerse yourself in your favorite writer’s non-fiction pieces, empathizing, learning how other people live.

10.   Try not to think about Chris Evans.

11.     Try not to replace Evans with thoughts of Eric Mabias.

12.    Sometimes you look online just for a new article or essay from one particular writer. Your preferred search engine has seen that author’s name so many times it might just roll its double ‘O’ eyes at you next time.

13.     Know who actually posed for Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting, but don’t brag about it.

14.     Gallop.

15.     Enjoy that author’s essay about which fictional character they once felt they could relate to the closest. They picked a character you wouldn’t expect and made a reasonable point. Plus they went on to blow the barnacle-covered lid off of the secret breeding of starfish cats.

16.     Use their writing as inspiration when coffee and ringing phones and Windex and a spider web and the creaking of a door frame and a memory of your cousin complaining about that thing that one time have all made your creativity run dry.

17.      Sleep in.

18.    Seek out articulate pieces that relate directly to problems and feelings you have had. Part of the human experience is the realization that none of us are so special that our problems are entirely unique.

Just six months ago, I was in one particular self-pitying state of mind, and I recently found a Thought Catalog article that specifically brought up things I had cycled through: Reading this made me feel better because I got to see an embarrassing phase of myself in writing, and this was followed by relief since I’ve finally chosen to move forward. Trying to get through experiences in an isolating, self-centered way is not artistic…it’s a damaging waste of time.

19.   Do-si-do.

20.  Make them some pie. Everyone likes pie, right? Leave it on their doorstep.

21.   During the process of writing a short story, you can tell yourself that it’s in the same vein as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom with all the imagination of Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell, or you can think, ‘It’s as if Mel Brooks wrote and directed an episode of Supernatural’, or that an editor will look at it and say, ‘Wow, so Wuthering Heights with a little person, a puppet and Hunter S. Thompson really would work!’, but in reality, we all interpret things so differently, and if a critique is coming from another writer, you have no idea what they’re going to say. Be excited, but don’t try to plan the affect your story will have. Don’t try to get a specific reaction from the author of ‘Why I’m Moving into This 1990’s Middle School Dance’  - just post your story and watch what happens. Maybe the aforementioned clever person will gift you with notes like, ‘Good death scene!!!!!!!’ or ‘Whatever -You’re an amateur at describing tongues’.

Personally, I skip the comments section because I’d rather focus on my work.

22.   Screw around with a typewriter. I think all writers should at least try it.

   23.   Buy their book.