For those who can't write

>have fiction published and win awards at uni
>lose mind for next five years
>only write two shorts
>same ol why I no rite?
>read Jerusalem
>read passage below
>read out loud to wife and tell her something is wrong because it doesn't motivate me to write
>she says it wouldn't. It will make you feel
>cry from a book for the first time
>sob uncontrollably
>post on Veeky Forums cuz I love yall
>hope one day I meet another writer who might have given up otherwise

One day soon he would be dead, reduced to ashes or else feeding worms. His entertaining funny mind, his self, that would just simply stop. That wouldn't be there anymore. Life would be going on, with all its romance and its thrills, but not for him. He would know nothing of it, like a splendid party at which he'd been made to feel he was no longer welcome. He'd have been crossed off the guest list, he'd have been erased as if he'd never been there. All that would be left of him would be a few exaggerated anecdotes, some mildewed poems in surviving copies of small-circulation magazines, and then not even that. It would have all been wasted, and...
It hit him suddenly, the bleak epiphany, and knocked the wind out him: thinking about death was something he habitually did as an alternative to thinking about life. Death wasn't what the problem was. Death wasn't asking anything of anyone, except for effortless decomposition. Death wasn't the thing with all the expectations and the disappointments and the constant fear that anything could happen. That was life. Death, fearsome from life's frightened point of view, was actually itself beyond all fear and hurt. Death, like a kindly mother, took the worrisome responsibilities and the decisions off your hands, kissed you goodnight and tucked you underneath the warm green counterpane. Life was the trial, the test, the thing you had to figure out what to do with before it was over.
But then, Benedict had done that. He'd decided, rashly, back in his romantic youth, that he'd be nothing if he couldn't be a poet. At the time, he hadn't really thought about the lesser of the two alternatives, the possibility that he might well end up as nothing. It had never happened for him, the success he'd thought he might achieve when he was younger, and he'd gradually lost heart. He'd pretty much abandoned writing, but it was so much a part of his identity that he could not admit, even to himself, that he had given up. He would pretend his inactivity was only a sabbatical, that he was lying fallow, gathering material, when he knew deep inside that he was only gathering dust.
(1/?)

(2/?)
He saw, as through a fog, the grave mistake he'd made. He'd been so anxious for success and validation that he'd come to think you weren't really a writer unless you were a successful one. He knew, in this unprecedented patch of clarity, that the idea was nonsense. Look at William Blake, ignored and without recognition until years after his death, regarded as a lunatic or fool by his contemporaries. Yet Benedict felt sure that Blake, with his three-score-and-ten had never a moment's doubt that he was a true artist. Ben's own problem, looked at in this new and brutal light, was simply a failure of nerve. If he had somehow found the courage to continue writing, even if each page had been rejected by each publisher it was submitted to, he'd still be able to look himself in the eye and know he was a poet. There was nothing stopping him from picking up his pen again except Earth's easily-resisted field of gravity.
This could be the night that Ben turned it all around. All that he had to do was walk across and sit down at his writing desk and actually produce something. Who knows? It might turn out to be the piece that would secure Ben's reputation. Or if not, if his abilities with verse seemed flat and clumsy with disuse, it might be the his first faltering step back to the path he'd wandered from, into this bitter-sodden and immobilizing bog. Tonight be his chance to mend himself. The starkian thought struck him that tonight might be his last chance.
If he didn't do it now, if he came up with some excuse about it being better to approach it in the morning when his head was fresher, then it seemed quite likely that he'd never do it. He'd keep finding reasons to put all his poetry aside until it was too late and life called time on him, until he ended up as a statistic at the top of Grafton Street with an indifferent police constable complaining that Ben's death had messed up his night off. Benedict had to do it right now, right this moment.
He got up and stumbled over to the writing desk, tripping upon his dangling laces on the way. He sat down and pulled out his notebook from a rear shelf of the bureau, pausing to ashamedly wipe thick dust from the cover with his palm before he opened it to a clean sheet. He picked the ballpoint pen that looked most viable out of the jam jar standing on the desk's top ledge, removed its cap and poised the sticky, furry ball of indigo above the naked vellum. He sat there like that a good ten minutes, coming to the agonizing realization that he couldn't think of anything to say.
Six things, then, that Ben Perrin was completely useless at: escape, finding a job, explaining himself properly, not looking pissed, talking to girls and writing poetry.

(3/3)
No. No, that wasn't true. That was just giving up again, maybe for good. He was determined to write something, even if it was a haiku, even if it was a line or just a phrase. He searched his cloudy memory of the uneventful day that he'd just had for inspiration and was startled by how many images and idle notions drifted back to him. The workhouse, Clare's asylum, Malcolm Arnold and the mermaid girl, clover motifs worked artfully into the head of foam upon Ben's dark and swirling consciousness. He thought about the aching crack of Freeschool Street and the drowned continent, the landscape that was gone. He thought about just packing all this drunken nonsense in and getting into bed.
Off in the blackness there were sirens, techno thumps, beer-baiting cheers. His right hand trembled, inches from the snow-blind empty page.

(4/4)
And then he wrote a fucking comic book of all things.

Die alone cynical faggot

made me kek

Ease up bro. Just takin the piss. Really terrific passage. Failed writer myself.

how can one be a failed writer before one dies?

I learned the hard way that no one gives a damn about a single word I have to say about anything and they never will and writing is just a waste of my time so I gave it up. Cost me ten years.

And then he wrote.
The pen was the conductor for his mind's lightning and thunder. For the first time in his life he wrote with clarity, commitment and zeal and... honesty. These words had to be etched into physical reality itself. For the first time he truly lived!

Several years later his books would become bestsellers AND classics. They had literary merit, great characters, plot, originality and brought back a lyricism to modern prose that many felt lacking. Some future scholars would proclaim Benedict's achievements as groundbreaking and even creating a new genre or a new way of writing or something, whatever.

In the end he still died, he made the party a little better for himself, for others - while it lasted. For a long time he thought his lifetime and posthumous achievements would enable him to excuse himself in a confident manner; of course he died alone, kicked out unceremoniously in abject terror, same as everyone else. Whatever.

This was very motivational, user, sincerest thanks.

do you care?

here
I mean, i write for myself - because i got something to write and something to say, being some bestseller is not in consideration.

This would be missing OPs point

Good man. I wish you luck

>"For those who can't write"
>His entertaining funny mind, his self, that would just simply stop.

Title was correct. Stopped reading there

that's a very strange coincidence. just this last minute, i was stalking the twitter of that girl who's posted above ('if you met this girl at a book club would you talk about DFW with her') and on her twitter she posted a picture of some books she bought. one of them is 'jerusalem,' by alan moore, which i had never heard of. the next thread i see is about that very book!

book coincidences are my favorite coincidences. this is the same alan moore who wrote the watchmen, etc?

yeah

It's called third person subjective i.e unreliable narrator you fucking idiot.

you like books of coincidence do you?
>The Roots of Coincidence

Yes, I absolutely do care that I've been shut out of the publishing industry and I'll never be published or have a career as a writer. Writing fiction that no one will ever read isn't a worthwhile hobby. There's nothing wrong with wanting an audience, and if you think there is, I question the honesty of that thought.

If you like reading about failed writers, I suggest The Longest Journey by E.M. Forster

Man why would you think that you've been shut out? And even so you could focus on getting shorts published even through a pseudonym. And there's always self-publishing.

>Yes, I absolutely do care that I've been shut out of the publishing industry
If you think that's true why not pretend to be a jew or a nigress or something?