Writer Math

If you think you need “just a few more hours,” you really need a few more months.

If I do math, I will get a headache and may throw up, but I wrote this anyway. Anyone can write about anything!

If you think a piece is 100 percent done, it’s actually 45 percent done. To get it to 100 percent done, you can’t.

Each breakthrough equals ninety days of clinical depression. (But you can’t pay upfront; if you commit to ninety days of clinical depression, then you may or may not get one breakthrough.)

There is such a thing as a negative number of words. This can happen if it’s December, a Tuesday, or there’s weather.

Today the writing is “100 percent genius”; tomorrow, it’s “95 percent so fucking stupid, what the fucking fuck was I doing; I quit; I fucking quit this shit.” The day after tomorrow, if you’re still working on the same thing, it’s 100 percent because of pills.

One publication isn’t enough, and neither is 1,000.

Formulas: If you think the writing is good, it’s bad. If you think the writing is bad, it’s good. If you think the writing is great, you must be invited to parties often. If you think the writing is shit, then you’re everyone else. If you go to a lot of parties, then you don’t write.

For praise, the limit does not exist.

Read the rest of my calculations on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

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Upcoming seminars and workshops where no math will be done:

Tragedy Plus Time: A Seminar

• June 2nd (Sunday)

• 2-5pm EST

• Online, via Writing Workshops

Tragedy plus time equals comedy, and in this three-hour seminar on “traumedy” we’ll do that: turn your tragedies into comedies (or at least more entertaining tragedies) using time and many more devices. Prerequisite: being in therapy.

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NEW: Funny Personal Essays: A Two-Day Intensive

In two days we’ll figure out how to turn an anecdote into an essay that’s funny and publishable.

• June 8th & 9th (Saturday & Sunday)

• 9am-12pm MDT

• Online, via Lighthouse Writers Workshop

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NEW: Hysterical: A Voice-Finding Seminar

In this once-in-a-lifetime seminar, we’ll cover every element of style and how you can use each one to sound like you in writing.

• June 8th (Saturday)

• 4-6pm MDT

• IN PERSON at Lighthouse Writers Workshop

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ICYMI: I’m Elissa Bassist, and I teach short conceptual humor/satire writing, funny personal essays, tragicomic memoir, emotional emails, and that’s it. I edit the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus, and I wrote the award-deserving book Hysterical.

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