How to write - WCW

Forget all rules, forget all restrictions, as to taste, as to what ought to be said, write for the pleasure of it -- whether slowly or fast -- every form of resistance to a complete release should be abandoned.

 

For today we know the meaning of depth, it is a primitive profundity of the personality that must be touched if what we do is to have it. The faculties, untied, proceed backward through the night of our unconscious past. It goes down to the ritualistic, amoral past of the race, to fetish, to dream to wherever the "genius" of the particular writer finds itself able to to.

 

At such a time the artist (the writer) my well be thought of as a dangerous person. anything may turn up. He has no connection with ordered society. He may perform an imbecility or he may be a freak of mind penetrate with tremendous value to society into some avenue long closed or never yet opened. But he is disconnected with any orderly advance or purpose.

-- The written object comes under the laws of all created things involving a choice and once the choice has been made there must be an exercise of the will to back it. one goes forward carefully. But the first step must not be to make what has been written under a quasi-hallucinatory state conform to rules. What rules? Rather the writing should be carefully examined for the new and the extraordinary and nothing rejected without clear reason. For in this way the intelligence itself is corrected.