I have, it appears, issues.

Executive summary: I kind of despise neophyte writers who dispense advice about writing as if they were Charles fucking Dickens. I propose to embark on becoming one of them now, but it doesn't count because blah blah blah.

In more detail: I have a fraught relationship to the whole business of Being a Writer. As a child and adolescent, writers (which to me has really always meant novelists first and foremost) were of course of course the most noble and romantic creatures in all of creation. I a...