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Life as literature.

The Manifesto of Literary Life:

There are those who live lives like film, those who live lives like sitcoms and those who long to live the literary life: they long because, in the end, living the literary life is more about longing than it is about living; more about striving than it is about being.

It is more about the novel that has been your life than the world that is your life.

Every day that dies leaves memories, chapters, as gravestones and those chapters, year by year, create a novel.

Ask yourself: are you the main character of your own novel? Would you like to read your own book?

If you hesitate even for a moment in saying yes, then you're seeking the literary life. The world created by the "characters" of low-lifes like Charles Bukowski, epicures like Henry Miller, monsters like Hemmingway and toxic lovers like Philip Roth; you seek to free yourself, finding zipless fucks like Erica Jong; you want to rage like Tyler Durden or wander like Dean Moriarty.

Fiction, autobiography, it doesn't matter: we're all characters, in the end.

Acknowledging this, the novel of life and your role as a character, is the literary life-- no one lives it, they only seek to live it.

After all, a novel is created by authors but ultimately judged by audience alone.

1. Wake up every morning determined to live an interesting chapter, even on a boring day.

2. Be positive. And if you're being negative, at least be funny.

3. Know your role. Hold your identity. Be the protagonist. Or the antagonist. Anything... but a minor character.

4. Shape the plot. Go somewhere. Do something. And say Yes to life as much as possible.

5. Remember: the world has subtle themes of subjectivity. It's a quantum universe out there, full of probabilities. Energy is real, whether we imagine it or not. As long as God is real to someone, God exists; as long as someone is willing to live a strange life, the fantastic is real.

This isn't new age. This is common sense. Existentialism 101.

6. A life unexamined is a life unlived. A novel unread is a novel that need never been written.

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