“You should never write about yourself.”

“You should publish on only these three platforms.”

“Your writing is not about you.”

“You need to publish once a day.”

“You shouldn’t publish every day.”

“You should not try to make money from writing.”

“If you want to make money from writing, try these tried and true tips.”

Like a cacophonous symphony of chaos, the various litanies of advice ramrodded throughout his head like a steel pinball. He couldn’t focus, he was so distracted by doing everything, anything right, correctly, properly, appropriately. His image was at stake and he couldn’t afford to fuck it up with even a slight misstep. He had to succeed. It wasn’t only a childhood dream, a passionate drive, an incessant push, it was necessity that drove him on: he had bills to pay and a mouth to feed, a belly–his–to fill, and–yes–plenty of bills to pay.

Strange how necessity is the mother of invention–or, in his case, creativity–but it makes perfect sense, seeing as how the drive to feed and house oneself could make one very inventive and creative. He did not know how he would do it, but he would have to succeed in his endeavor to write.

The cacophonous advice bounced around some more in his mind.

He shook his head to clear it.

He didn’t know what he was supposed to do, how he was supposed to proceed. He was an avid writer, keen on words…but so was every writer that was out there. Every writer was just as unique and special as he was; and every writer, including he himself, was as diluted in the ocean of orthography, the sea of text and language, spread wide across the web of the Internet. He knew the advice. He knew what the googled algorithms spewed out to him in his frantic searches. But he did not know how to bridge the gap from here to there, from being a single seed, to becoming a broken seed, buried deep in the soil, and flourishing as a tree with many seeds to spare in its blossoming fruit.

Writing was all he could do. It was all he actually knew.

The world was too vast and frigid a place to find himself in it.

He could only do what he knew to do. And so he did.