When a Man Italicizes Feet, Then It Is Okay to Take His Suggestions

"Ruining your life...is an effective path towards writerly enlightenment. You should write a post of good ways to ruin your life for the sake of inspiration."

Disclaimer: It should not be assumed that Jill or anyone that confides in Jill has ever done, or ever intends to do, or even has ever had a situation that brought to mind the thought of doing, any of these things. Though it shouldn't be assumed the opposite, either. Believe what you will.

Good Ways to Ruin Your Life for the Sake of Inspiration

1. Regularly get drunk with one of your college professors who actually lives with his girlfriend and may or may not be certifiably insane. Let nature take its course. Let this develop into a long-term relationship. Write about it. Don't finish the project, though, because you HATE plots.

2. Regularly get drunk with one of your college professors who actually lives by himself and quite possibly is gay or at least bisexual, and most likely has some sort of crush on the professor who lives with his girlfriend. Sleep with him. Refrain from killing him when he decides to cut off all communication with you even though you are still in his class. Get an A in the class and then write about all the ways you could have killed him. Get grad school credit for the writing. Sell mucho tickets at a festival.

3. Date an actor. Write about his inability to accept compliments or express his feelings. Place very high in a writing contest with the result.

4. Become best friends with your ex-boyfriend, the actor. Write about how you get nothing done when you hang out together. Simultaneously, develop crush on 400 year old dead procrastinating fictional character. Write about how delusions of conversing with aforementioned fictional character dovetail nicely with how little work you get done when hanging out with aforementioned ex-boyfriend. Write an academic essay about your creative writing about your delusions. Get grad school credit for both. Sell out run at major festival.

5. Pine.

6. Pine.

7. Pine.

8. But, you know, don't admit the truth.

9. Truth, you see, is stranger than fiction.

10. Therefore, when you write the truth, vaguely enough, people think you're creative.

11. So, you know, why live the truth, when you could just write about it?

12. It's all in the telling.

13. Run away to someone you barely know.

14. Run away with someone you barely know.

15. Think of how many hits your blog would get if all in the blogosphere knew what you'd done, and couldn't wait to hear the sordid details. Think you, possibly, wouldn't care.

16. Self-publish your multimedia journal from the excursion.

17. Sleep with some guy who's probably gay, but at the least is unsatisfying. Become buddies once you get over it. Collaborate.

18. Leave that phone message you've been dying to leave. Sit back and wait for the response. Record the conversation. Transcribe. Publish.

19. Obsessively save all your email and IM conversations. Stop going out into the real world, so that you can stay home, cut and paste them, and turn them into a novel.

20. Ignore someone for as long as you possibly can. Then let sparks fly. Chick lit is hot market.

21. Wake yourself up every two hours and force yourself to write down all the naughty dreams you're having about the person you're ignoring. Sleep deprivation may be a torture method, but clit lit is a hot market.

22. Take a shower.

If you all have any additional suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.