First, this week, a link. I love it, so I won’t say anything at all about it—save, perhaps, “There is a light that never goes out.” Here ‘tis.

Maybe I’ll say one more thing. MFA dropouts of the world unite.

Writing can’t be taught. Form can be studied, and discussed. Specificity of language and punctuation can be practiced. Areas of needed improvement can be spotlighted.

Listen, I’ll tell you a story: there was a Boy named Yain. Yain lived in a village bordered by a river and a deep, dense wood. Yain saw holy lights shining in his brain. His parents could not see them. The village elders couldn’t see them either. Neither could his friends.

One day Yain decided to go see the Shaman who lived in the mountains, for no one else could help him. So Yain climbed and climbed, and eventually reached the Shaman’s hut. He told the Shaman about the lights in his brain, and the Shaman said: “Yain, I tell you from experience: those lights will destroy you, burning in your brain like that. You have to get them out.”

“How do I do that?” Asked Yain.

“Turn them into something you love.”

So, Yain went deep into the woods. He couldn’t have told you why he went straight for woods: it just felt right. The Shaman also told him magic is nothing but an expression of your willpower, considered by others (without that willpower) to be impossible. So Yain focused, and he courted those lights in his head, and he reached his hands into the muddy earth below him, and he fashioned a horse. And the lights he put into the horse, and they gave the horse life. This was how Yain created the fastest horse in the world. This is how Yain became the dawn rider.*

…No, you are not supposed to take this story particularly seriously. It’s a metaphor.

Yain is the writer. The lights? Whatever drives us to write. The forest? Our subconscious. The mud? An Art-form. In this case sentences, prose. The family and elders and village, that’s society.

The horse?

The horse is the greatest ride in the known cosmos. Ask any writer. If we didn’t think it was the greatest ride in the cosmos, we wouldn’t be writers.

If you’re a writer and you’re reading this and you don’t know what I’m talking about, then for the love of god do the smart thing and forget this prose nonsense. Find sensible work.

And if you know what I’m talking about, and you really want my advice, then go on and build yourself a fast horse. Make it the perfect horse for you. (Yain’s has seven legs, three tails and a mowhawk.)

(You can’t teach a boy with lights in his head how to build a horse. Anatomy of horses can be studied, and discussed. Specificity of bone structure and musculature can be practiced. Areas of needed improvement can be spotlighted.)

If you don’t want my advice, you’re my brother, too in love with riding to give a f*ck what some other fool thinks about it. Aren’t you? This is where, like cyclists each independently tackling a stretch of burly asphalt, we give each other a hearty nod.

*In case you’re wondering, Yain never once explains the details of just how he made that horse to anybody, how he got the light in the clay. People think he’s being secretive, but the simple truth is, there aren’t words and it did itself. Yain rides through countless foreign lands, rescuing princesses, saving kings, feeding the poor and defending the wretched, and eventually returns to his village where he marries Olga, a 19 year old brilliant dreamer who bears him 60 daughters.

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