HOW TO LOSE MONEY & ENTERTAIN PEOPLE, A MANIFESTO

By Dominic Hoey

Fuck Clichés

Avoid oceans when depressed and sun sets when in love, fuck rewriting dogma and fan fiction of the new hot literature style that nobody's even sure they really like.

Become A Thief

Break into poets' houses and rip pages from their notebooks, eavesdrop on the homeless, catch the bus and record conversations of people breaking up on their phones, fill in the blanks later, rewrite your favourite film as a haiku, hang a possum trap over your bed, dissect dead dreams every morning.

Make Peace With Dying Poor

Advertising execs are not creatives, it's like calling landlords architects, refrain from middle-class dreaming, centrist politics, anaemic blood money, bankrupt institutions preaching painless pragmatism, academics with isolationist theories, unintelligible essays stapled to unreadable poems, they are all graveyards.

Celebrate Failure

Buy balloons and cake and illegal fireworks, make cut up poetry from rejection letters and post them back to the dead eyed bureaucrats who sent them, take risks, gamble everything and pray to whatever god will listen that it works out, walk away laughing when it doesn't, befriend your mistakes, follow every stupid idea to its illogical conclusion.

Find Your Voice And Scream Until They Call The Cops

The personal is universal, your point of view is the only thing you own of any value, live a life and take notes, remember your job is not to be objective, your job is to make the mundane poignant and beautiful and hilarious.

Write Something That Scares People

Everything's political including landscapes, rhyming couplets and pastoral musings, pick a fucking side, only confuse people you hate, celebrate loved ones in your work, even/especially if they don't have savings or a heat pump, be wary of gatekeepers dressed as failed artists, corporate money = death etc . . .

Quit Your Job

Tell your boss you need time more than money, walk everywhere, learn to love baked beans, shoplifting is both easy and rewarding, if you find yourself stumbling down the middle of the street one night, drunk, with one shoe on, screaming "I didn't sign up for this", refer to point 3.

Work Harder Than Everyone Else

The first draft of anything is shit, so is the second and third, practice until you hate your words, practice until you forgive them.

Learn To Love Your Subconscious

There's a sewer of LSD running through your skull, live in dream logic, ask the dog what it thinks about the economy, turn nightmares into metaphors and render them harmless, freewrite your memoirs.

Don't Give Up

The only thing standing between you and your heroes is time and work, you'll always worry you're not good enough in-between feeling like a god, write the stories you want to read, sing the songs you want to hear, feed the fires you want to burn.