one eye put out from a staple glancin' off a post

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/authors/harry-crews

A recent column in LitReactor reminded me about this dude Harry Crews, whose books I haven't read in a while and who is basically a Southern Gothic GG Allin, which is pretty fucking badass. Now I know "badass" gets thrown around way too often, and I'm guilty of it, too. Frat parties and longboarding through traffic, brah, are not badass activities. 99.9 percent of tattoos are not badass. Drinking Bud Light Platinums on a work night until you puke is not badass. Getting massively scarred in knife fights after the age of 70 is super badass. Read the column and do a quick Google search of Crews and you'll see what I mean. 

But gnarliness aside, the guy can write. And he gives great advice about writing. Anyone attempting to write fiction should at least heed the words of an OG who managed to give birth to seven amazing novels in eight years in the midst of a violent thirty-year blackout. Luckily someone was smart enough to recently film him dropping wisdom.

Some quotes:

"The amateur, or the coward, or the non-writer, will try to keep it and make it work because he doesn't want to have to throw it away and do all of that over again another way. The real artist, with no tear in his eye, and no sadness in his heart, puts the pages in the fire and does it again."

"All of fiction is about one of two things: love or the absence of love."

"Who could imagine her having the flu, or snot coming out of her nose, or her wiping her ass. Who could imagine that? Nobody, nobody. It's Beauty. It is what it is and it will be what it is forever, even though we know perfectly well it will not. That it will decay and die."

"Any piece of fiction that has a point to make is bad. It's gonna be bad. Because no one knows what the fucking point is."

"The Old Man and the Sea is not about fishing."

The entire thing:

And here's Crews jamming out some stories in the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus: