How To Not Write

by Lisa Crystal Carver

Cynthia Santiglia, the editor: Can you imagine editing a book titled "How To Not Write"? Neither can I. But I think I did it, anyway. Lisa Carver-- writer, provocateur, philosopher, friend. Not to mention flat-out genius. Thank you for the opportunity. Everyone else, read this book. Even if you aren't a writer, you are. What's it about? Is it really a writing book? Lisa says, "Yes, it is a writing book. Writing is the same as living, that's what people forget. This book is here to remind you by force."

Genres: Nonfiction

174 pages, Paperback

First published November 16, 2014

About the author

Lisa Crystal Carver (born 1968[1]), also known as Lisa Suckdog, is an American writer known for her writing in Rollerderby.[2] Through her interviews, she introduced the work of Vaginal Davis, Dame Darcy, Cindy Dall, Boyd Rice, Costes (her ex-husband with whom she performed Suckdog), Nick Zedd, GG Allin, Kate Landau, Queen Itchie & Liz Armstrong to many. A collection of notable articles from the zine was published as Rollerderby: The Book.

She started touring with the performance art band Psycodrama when she was 18 years old.[3] It was also at this time that she became a prostitute, which has been a major theme in her writings over the years.[4] She began touring with Costes a year later, and would also tour without him when he was in France. She toured the U.S. and Europe six times, the last time in 1998. The noise music soap operas included audience interaction including dancing and mock-rape of audience members.[3]

Carver is the also the author of Dancing Queen: a Lusty Look at the American Dream, in which she expounds upon various relics of pop culture past, including Lawrence Welk, roller rinks, and Olivia Newton-John. In 2005, Soft Skull Press released her newest book, Drugs Are Nice, detailing her early childhood and later romantic relationships with Costes, Boyd Rice and Smog's Bill Callahan. In addition to writing her own 'zines and books, Carver has also written for various magazines (including Peter Bagge's comic book Hate) and kept a fictionalized journal about her sex life for the website Nerve. Although Carver no longer writes her journal for the site, she is still a semi-regular contributor. The online Journal at Nerve was subsequently published in book form as The Lisa Diaries: Four Years in the Sex Life of Lisa Carver and Company. (via Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you read THE DICE MAN by Luke Rhinehart? It’s about a guy who carries a die and for each side he comes up with a different way of responding to a situation, from the benign to the malignant. The roll determines what he does next, no matter how it lands he must play it as it lays. It’s a great book and when I read it of course I tried to live my life within the lunatic system devised by the author.

Lisa Carver’s HOW TO NOT WRITE reminded me of the Rhinehart novel in that it attacks preconceived notions, turns them upside down and shakes the loose change from the pockets. That’s a pretty penny, making people think differently, not as a marketing ploy but in a more revolutionary manner.

Through short chapters ending with assignments, Carver butchers sacred cows. She even contradicts herself, for all rules, even her own, are made to be broken. I’m reminded of the best homework I got in art school, to make the worst illustration. Students with tightly rendered styles came in with their most expressive work of the semester. Carver has an assignment like this and others, some strange and unique to her sensibility, and all of which may not be wholly original but have never been presented with her evangelistic charm.

Of course, this is more than a how-to book for writers. It can be applied to any art, but more importantly to living life, which Carver equates with writing. What a fine idea! Why do people separate and departmentalize when life and living are all one big squishy thing? Please, squeeze.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not "How Not To Write," but "How To Not Write." There are guides on how to write, and, in the case of books like Drivel, in which now-famous authors share their worst early writing to give us all hope, there are books on how not to write. But Lisa Carver, author of Rollerderby, Reaching Out With No Hands, Drugs Are Nice, and, mostly recently, Money's Nothing, gives us something else. A guide to not writing.

Most books like this give you prompt after prompt. Write about a favorite childhood memory. Don't stop free-writing for five minutes. Ten minutes. Describe the room. Things like that. Carver uses some of these starting points ("Don't be a good writer. Just Write." or "Cut the Wuss Out."), but stretches them farther, bordering at times on criminality. Looking for a way to motivate yourself? See if you can get yourself kidnapped by your friends! If you know they could be bursting through the door at any moment to take you to an undisclosed location, you're more likely to keep your ass in your seat. Or how about "Be a dick," in which you're encouraged to follow someone around all day like a private investigator, taking notes on them the whole time. "Assignment: Tail someone the whole day. You might even get arrested. That will make for an interesting day."

If you'd rather stick to things you can do in your own home, you could always "stay up all night." You could "love athletes and feed their bodies with helplessness" (a sentence Carver came up with by using the the Burroughsian cut-up). My favorite is "As it had been scales, something like scales: fish scales," in which Carver takes a line from the King James Bible (about Saul/Paul's blindness being lifted from him and something like fish-scales falling from his eyes) and finds 10 variants on it in other Bible translations. From this, Carver picks up a brilliant way to analyze your own writing. "Dig up a decent-sized, strong-idea'd sentence you've written, in an essay or in an email, whatever, or that someone else wrote, and come up with ten slightly altered versions of it. See if one or two slight word changes change everything."

The goal of all writing guides is to get you out of comfortable space and into controlled discomfort. It's when you step out of your rutted paths that you see something interesting and new, or so it's hoped. Carver goes far beyond the paths of writing, even outside of some of the paths of standard living. Because, as she says, "I've never once been tired of writing. That's like being tired of living." To her, the two are inseparable, and if you live your life without fear of being arrested or being embarrassed or being kidnapped or flogging yourself ("uh...and send me the pictures" she quips after suggesting this prompt), your writing will veer closer and closer to that true meaning you have deep down inside, the one that never seems to come out right on paper. If the fear of writing is the fear of living, Carver asks you to prep for writing the way Werner Herzog asks you to prep for filmmaking: don't be afraid of getting shot, know how to build a fire in the rain, and realize that after you've spent time in an African prison, there isn't much left to be afraid of. Many of these prompts are also life prompts -- try following random orders, even if they seem absurd to you. Write with tears in your eyes (and try just crying once in a while, you bottled-up jerk!). Gather experiences, especially uncomfortable ones, and realize that you end up surviving them all.

I enjoyed this book a great deal. Because I am the uptight beta Carver's trying to get through to, I have not yet flogged myself or asked my friends to kidnap me or starved myself for 72 hours to see what comes to me. Maybe I will some day. I have tried others. I've mashed up sections from different stories I was writing to see if anything new would happen. I've written variants on a sentence, changing small but key words to see if everything changes. I've intentionally written poorly, and from an opposite point of view. I liked it. It didn't always result in writing I'd want anyone else to see, but it never felt like a waste of time.

If you're going to go for something that will crack open your writers block, the least you can do is go strong. If you're serious about this, at least consider all the options Carver lays before you. If you've ever read her exploits in Rollerderby or Drugs are Nice and thought, "I could NEVER do that!", I urge you to think about that again. You don't have to do it for life. But hey, maybe an afternoon wouldn't be too scary? Might learn something.

[Naomi]

this book was- wow. liberating. hilarious. freaky. concerning.

a super engaging and easy read. so many things that i want to implement as a writer, and well, just as a person, to get out of my head and this capitalistic, mainstream construction of what writing and life is "supposed" to be. i appreciate this book for reminding me that some things aren't as serious as we chalk them up to be (like, the 'rules' of writing, being conventional). that things that supposedly matter don't! and the things that do, we often forget or don't pay atttntion to bc we're so caught up w the day to day. a helpful tool for when you might be feeling stuck as a writer, or just not feeling like a person. feeling disconnected from yourself and others.

here's a few bits that stood out to me: "Demanding that someone else's reality ring true for you denies that meaning and existence can be very different from person to person" & "As writers, we are outside our society. It's up to us to see with new eyes, not to enforce laws and moral standards."

it made me excited to write and live. it reminded me that writing is powerful and important and liberating.

[Mattias Ivarsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was suffering from a deep depression last autumn. When I am sick I loose the ability to read but now that I´m back on my feet I picked a copy "How To Not Write". It was like an explosion in a fantastic way. To go from zero to 300 mp/h. Lisa Carver has that effect with her words. It´s hard to describe How To Not Write or to sum it up but I urge everyone to read it. It´s an experience.

[Tony Boies · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entertaining to the max! Both fun and functional, Lisa Carver's latest book gives tips on breaking conventional writing rules, and more importantly, how to break your life rules. With assignments!

[Arvo Zylo]

I've read at least three reviews of Lisa Carver's works that had some element of an "I no longer want to have sex with her" type of conclusion within their somewhat short missives, as if it were a damning, all-encompassing, inevitable definition of a works' validity .

I haven't read Carver's "sex diaries", much less her full breadth of writings, but I've read a handful of her works.

She's a Scorpio, and I try not to hold it against her.

Having familiarized myself with some of the writings of David Mamet during the same period that I finished this book, I could only wonder if people gauged the quality of his work in the same way. I never did want to have sex with David Mamet, but I think he's smarter than I am in some ways, with the added caveat that some people are just remarkably obtuse in other areas of thought.

In any case, there are plenty of reviews of this book that expound upon the "thinking outside of the box" mannerisms contained therein. I'm not a person with enough room in my closets to lock myself in them, but I have done a lot of what she suggests at least once, prior to reading, except where publishers are concerned. I could add that one might trying writing whilst skydiving or making love, but the list of potential things that one could do to write differently is infinite.

Overall, the book is a good pep talk, and is touching in a way that I didn't expect.