The Dirty Works of Shane Levene

I rarely mix with other writers. Other writers don’t interest me, are not like me. They look like writers, act like writers, speak like writers and narrate like writers. Poor bastards. They even walk like writers. You know, that funny waddle they acquire like they’re trying not to fart. Jeffrey Archer and Salmon Rushdie both leave literary gatherings in that state. What a hell of a fate. And yet, from such promised promise, very few men like that are writers. It's easy to understand why. It's always the same old story.

 

What an absolute shit he is with those restrained, self-censored sentences and the myriads of literary devices that keep him sane. An absolute fucking rubbish bag. If the guy ever got a whiff of real life, he'd be carried out unconscious from the smell of it.

 

“Animal intestines!” I screamed in his face the last time I saw him. He stood there looking like a commercial jet had just passed low over his head. He slowly put down his glass of orange juice and wobbled away like he had drunk a brewery. The shitwipe was in shock. SHOCK! He had only just stopped twittering on about conflict and resolution, foreshadowing and fleshing out his little wooden characters. Oh, I'd like to scream a few intestines at that dollop of crap right now, take his rotten pen and pop it right through his retina, bring that old retro typewriter that he uses down on top of that thick skull which protects his packet of air and gunk. No, I just don't associate with literary men. I never have and I certainly never want to become one. There are only three fetishes men like that have: pens, typewriters and words. No doubt they spend their nights with a cheap biro rammed up their anus, their cock shoved under the space bar while they type out the most ridiculous orgasm. But no… Strike that. I could admire a man like that: someone like that could possibly be a guide to great literature.

 

He doesn't know I watch what he does, but I do. One of the worst writers I've ever stumbled across, and yet he spends all day on social media, picking out grammatical and structural problems in the works of well-known writers.

 

"Ha! He wrote: ‘Thought to himself’!!! Unnecessary phrase! All thoughts are to ourselves! What a novice. No time for novices or pretenders!

O, I wish people would learn the bloody difference between "your" and "you're" and “there" and "they’re" and “their"! Come on people, smarten up. Tut tut tut. Introductory clauses must be comma'd off! When will people learn the very basics of usage and punctuation. Hope he never needs to use a frickin' semi-colon!”

 

And it goes on. And if he’s not picking over someone else's work he'll be constantly yapping on about his own. Reminding people in every update that he is a ‘WRITER’:

 

Hmmm. Frustrating afternoon with the conflict resolution scene in chapter 9. All finished, alas, and the readers will feel so much better rewarded for it!

Show don't tell! Just gave a second pass over chapter 7, honed down some of the mid-section tension and worked on the progressive tempo which will drag readers into the final third of the book! 50,000 words today. WOW!

 

Now, I'll tell you a few things about shit bags like that:

 

They will never write anything even half decent or worthwhile in their entire lives. Their writing will always read like common stock, like anonymous writing that is found in some free magazine or the crap that people who enrol in free evening creative writing courses churn out. Such people will never comprehend that grammar is only ever a guideline for those already in above their necks, that there is not a single grammatical rule that cannot be flushed down the toilet with the waste. And yet these shitbags would disregard a man's life work for a typo or a badly- placed comma on the first page.

 

"Misuse of comma! Ha! Instant binning! Idiot. Shouldn't be allowed near a pen or typewriter!"

​

And it is right there, in the need for someone to be such a stickler for rules and guidelines, that tells us that such a person could never write a succession of great words, and rarely even a succession of important words. They are walking a tightrope with a safety net below. They are literary cowards. And when writing is brought down to a series of rules and devices, that is where writing becomes constricted to the point of predictability and death. It is no more than writing by numbers. It’s where writing becomes uniform, publishable but uniform. And, much like most journalism, which is also a victim of guidelines, there ends up no real need to even put the author’s name below the piece, because it could have been written by a thousand other gutless souls.

 

Such people are dangerous. They are dangerous because it is arseholes like them who end up in stuffy editorial rooms, deciding on who gets published and who does not. Such people are the foes of literature. If a great writer’s work ever landed on their desk, they’d bin it in a fury of contempt. Imagine such a maggot,sat there in his gaudy office, still typing up letters on a cranky old typewriter and becoming aroused over the smell of the red and black ink spool. There he is, evolved into a bizarre kind of mite that never sees the light, and the work of Faulkner or Joyce or even Hemingway is put before him. Why, he’d completely miss the brilliance of the work for what he’d no doubt interpret as grammatical peculiarities and outright errors. It would go in the bin with the corner crusts of his afternoon sandwich, and the author would be ridiculed until the next one came along. Imagine a Cormac McCarthy novel coming that unfortunate way. These cretinous cowards would be so aggrieved by the confusion of his words that they'd no doubt send an insulting note back saying that his manuscript made for nothing but good tinder, and a second one giving him tips on how to write and formulate sentences! These are the vile people who are only kept sane thanks to the walls of the madhouse; who need rules, baby-steps, to lead them to where they are going. Such people are the spoilers of great writing, the enemies of the illiterate, the bullies of the dyslexic. They are literary cowards, condemned to 3 point 4 million words of nothing much at all.