“The Kick-Ass Writer” by Chuck Wendig- it starts with porn and then it gets to the good stuff

“The Internet is 55 percent porn and 45 percent writers.”

Thus opens the first chapter of “The Kick-Ass Writer” by Chuck Wendig. Now, as far as I’m concerned, any book that manages to squeeze the word “porn” into the first six words of its very first sentence is bound to be a great book. It gets my mind running wild, my salivary glands busy, and my internal temperature up by at least 10 degrees, which is always a good thing since I’m cold most of the time. Living in Buffalo, NY does that to you. That’s why I’m reading porn … to keep warm.

So, yes, Chuck Wending and I got off to a good start. Never mind that the poor guy doesn’t even know me … which is fortunate. I noticed that, once someone really gets to know me, they tend to run away. That made me become a runner. I wanted to be able to keep up, at least for a while, with some of the people I’m driving away. It doesn’t work though: either I’m the world’s slowest runner, or those people run super fast. Who knows what motivates the poor souls?

Back to Chuck now: I picked up “The Kick-Ass Writer” a couple of days ago and all I can say is I abso-freakin’-lutely love it. It’s exactly what I needed now that I’ve decided to get serious about my writing.

The beginning is great, but what comes after is even great-er. Chuck Wendig is smart, extremely funny … even with the jokes I don’t get or think are not so great. See, I overlook imperfections when it comes to extremely witty people.

He’s also someone who has been writing for 13 years. He knows the ups, the downs, the insecurities, and fears that come with being a writer. He’s been there. He’s done that. He’s still there. He’s still doing it. And he writes about it in plain, direct, sometimes obscene language. What’s not to like about that?

I love what he wrote:

“You will always have days when you feel like an amateur. When it feels like everybody else is better than you. You will have this nagging suspicion that someone will eventually find you out, call you on your bullshit, realize you’re the literary equivalent of a vagrant painting on the side of a wall with a piece of calcified poop.”

It’s a perfect description of how I feel right now, and I haven’t even been seriously writing yet. I have decided though that I will stop calling myself a wanna-be writer. I am a writer, darn it. A crappy, insecure one. But a writer nonetheless.

And, some day, I will be a great writer. Because, you know what? “The writer you are when you begin is not the writer you become.” That’s another bit of wisdom coming from Chuck Wendig. Told you he was smart.

I’m going back to reading “The Kick-Ass Writer”. It’s that good. His blog, at terribleminds.com, is good too.