Don't Do It

Charles Bukowski (1920-94) was a published author of short stories while in his 20's. But because of his disdain for the publishing process, he stopped writing and embarked on a ten year spree of cheap alcohol, loose women, rooming houses, and low-end jobs including a stint in a pickle factory. He wound up with a part-time job as a letter carrier for the Los Angeles post office. After three years, he quit and started writing again, but continued his decadent LA lifestyle and love affair with the bottle.

He was prolific throughout the rest of his life, publishing several major books and thousands of poems in small publications, and working exclusively with independent presses. Collections of his published and unpublished poems are still being released twenty years after his death from leukemia.

Although he rejected such labels, Bukowski is considered to be the godfather of the "dirty realism" movement which depicts society's seamy underbelly; and a forerunner of the "transgressive fiction" genre, a minimalist, character-driven style of writing, that explores such taboo subjects as incest, pedophilia, drug abuse, alcoholism, and violent crime.

The following is Bukowski's most famous poem. It is regarded as one of the greatest poems ever written on creative expression and artistic motivation.

So You Want to be a Writer

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of people
who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and pretentious,
don't be consumed with self-love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to sleep over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would drive you to madness
or suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.