So You Want to Be a Famous Writer, Part 2: Your Manuscript

Now that you've secured a crippling personality defect that fans and journalists can use to paint you with the broadest of strokes, it's time to get to the actual task of writing. Any writers' forum online will tell you that you need to start writing immediately and often because writing is like any other exercise in that you have to do it often to get good at it. These people are idiots.

Step 2: Writing Your Manuscript

Go back and read your favorite piece of literature. Does that seem like it was written, re-written, edited, re-edited, and polished multiple times? Of course not. Pure gold like that comes forth from the minds of geniuses completely intact. That's why only geniuses become amazing writers. So first you're going to have to identify whether or not you're a genius with this simple test:

• Are you smarter than your friends?
• Do you read books or watch movies and think, "I could come up with that?"
• Have you never actually written before, but figure it's got to be pretty easy?
   

If you answered yes to any of these questions, congratulations! You're ready to become a famous writer! Now you just need to choose the format your masterpiece will take. Short story? Novel? Essay? Everyone knows these forms of literature are long dead, as attention spans have dropped to the point where you've probably left this page several times to check sports scores or look at pictures of kittens already.

Instead, you should consider making your novel something more digestible, like a web comic. Everyone loves web comics. They get passed around and shared on different sites and pretty soon you're famous! Plus I hear if you set up a Google AdSense account you will probably get rich from all those Likes and Shares and stuff. Don't worry if you can't draw well; no one likes well-drawn web comics. The best web comics use old ClipArt images or poorly-drawn caricatures or just stick figures anyway. The most important part of your novel-turned-web-comic is the name, any way. Your web comic should have a silly-sounding name that people will think has some deeper meaning despite being completely nonsensical, like "Murder Potatoes" or "Arsenic and Dinosaurs" or "Tetrahydrocannabanana."

Got it? Great. Everyone come up with a hilarious web comic name for your novel, and next time we'll focus on your outline.