Writing The Unthinkable

What does that mean, writing the unthinkable?!? Is writer-artist Lynda Barry going to sequester all 45 of us aspiring writers up in a tiny room with no bathroom and not let us out until one person writes something that halfway decent? Do we have to use our own blood for ink? Do we have to smell each others' armpits for inspiration? This is totally freaking me out and you can totally tell because this sentence has three exclamation points after it!!!

I was so scared that I had to get Annie to sign up for the writing workshop with me. She didn't really want to do it, but I reminded her that deep inside of her, there is someone waiting to emerge and write better love letters to prison inmates.

We will be spending this first weekend of 2008 writing. I am hoping that this workshop will help me become a better writer or at the very least make me lose ten pounds trying, since I will be writing instead of snacking constantly.

Either way, it will be $200 well spent. And after six years, at an 22% APR when I've paid it off on my credit card, it would only be about $6,021.19. That's sooo totally reasonable. By then, I would be a famous author looking back at how one workshop in 2008 was the beginning of my writing career...


LISTEN TO THIS: An NPR interview with Lynda Barry where she talks about how anybody can be a writer or an artist or an musician. How if we never edit ourselves and give in to our fear of sucking, we could be good at it, whatever it is. "What's the point of art?" Lynda once asked her mentor. The reply, "That sounds like a question you can ask only when you're not doing it." Wow.

READ THIS: Thinking the Unthinkable

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More Unthinkable:


Annie has written for NMP. Check it out.

Books by Lynda Barry: