Today I’ll tell you a story about how to become a bad writer.

When I finished my second book Anugami, the Follower, the publisher told me after reading my manuscript that my writing was too complicated in words—I was using too complex, ancient Sanskrit words to form my ideas, and that wasn’t viable for readers or today’s market. Then I sat down at my computer to trim down my manuscript, but after editing a few words it felt like I was truncating my own head. I told myself—

‘I am a bad writer, let’s face it.’

I emailed my publisher that I wasn’t comfortable editing my words, that it wasn’t healthy for my writing. That’s all. Then they published it anyway. At that time, compared to the big Western market, my book did well in the small Nepalese market. Then I had the chance—or say the guts—to write another one. I started writing a few chapters for a sequel and finished in six months. Sent it to publishers but they abandoned it directly—never published (that manuscript is still in my boxes somewhere). After that I started bothering English publishers and readers with my writing. Got published: Who Will Bury the Dead God, The Outsider, The Unknown Existence of Being, etc.

But the good thing is, in the West, myriads of bad writers have existed since long ago, so it was easy for me to console myself being a bad—jargon-full, meshed-up writer.

Everyone keeps talking about good writing—clean lines, sharp metaphors, something that turns words into beautiful, coherent architecture—but I don’t trust that anymore. I don’t trust the kind of beauty that shows up with a comb and calls itself control, because the truth doesn’t have structure. It leaks, it folds, it panics, and I’ve seen what happens when I try to tidy my scream—it dies. So that’s where the bad writing begins, somewhere between the scream and the sentence that tries to erase it. So what do your guts say to you? Want to write good or bad? Want to become lasting legacy or ephemeral void? The choice is yours.

I used to sit there with my tiny perfect laptop-became-desktop at that time, connecting through USB cable to make it like an all-in-one PC, trying to clean every sentence like it was a mistake that might infect someone. But from the beginning, infection was my point. Language needs to drip a little pus to be alive—pus of aggressive writing, messy writing, messy psychology of the head. Artaud was right when he said the nerves are the real text, not the grammar, not the syntax, but that jittery, bone-splitting static that happens when words hurt more than silence, and I write anyway, because what else do I do when I’ve run out of ways to lie politely? I write my true nerve.

Editors talk about discipline, about structure, about voice—God, as if voice is something you can sculpt like a career. Tell me honestly, as if Beckett sat down with a brand guide—but the best writing, the kind that makes you wince in the gut, comes from failure, from incoherence, from that place where meaning slides off the edge of itself and you can’t tell if you’re writing or breaking or both at once. That’s the place I’m trying to get to, the place where the sentence tears its skin unevenly and you can hear it moaning.

“Good” writing is what you show people when you want love. “Bad” writing is what happens when love’s gone and there’s no audience and you write anyway, just to see if the page will hold your weight. I do the same. I don’t wait for love, I chase the void and missing and bad. It’s messy—it repeats, it stutters, most of the time it collapses mid-sentence and never recovers from that brokenness—through a thought and keeps crawling on its elbows—and yet there’s something strangely sacred in that collapse, that brokenness stood on its own two legs like our ancestors first ever did—beautiful to walk with two legs, freeing my two hands to write as messily as I can, because at least it’s honest, at least it doesn’t pretend to have an ending or a resolution or the limp leg of a moral arc that makes sense of pain.

I remember writing once after not sleeping for two days, drinking boxes of beer and whisky, after wanting to claw out of my own skin, and the words came like vomit but quieter—beautiful—and I didn’t revise them, didn’t clean them, just left them there, raw, stinking, and alive—that’s my Who Will Bury The Dead God. And that word-sting I let be there for weeks; I inhaled its bad odor. That’s what this whole thing is about: that urge to keep what should have been deleted, to trust the ruin more than the reconstruction.

Kafka’s fragments, Nietzsche’s broken aphorisms, Dostoevsky’s chaos—they weren’t being lazy, they were drowning correctly, letting truths flow like the ever-flowing Ganges or Kali Gandaki, letting the syntax choke on its own breath because the flow of psyche is incoherent, and sometimes the only way to tell the truth is to write like I’m speaking through broken teeth, tongue heavy with its own fear, commas flickering its tongue into ellipses, everything one long desperate line. Have you seen Artaud’s sentences, words, characters? It’s like God standing on one leg yet dancing to kill the ignorances.

To be a bad writer is to admit the sentence will fail you, to chase its filthy raw honest trails, and then write it anyway. To drag language through the dark, kicking and stammering, to whisper into the cracked mouth of grammar, “I can’t make this better—it’s not supposed to be better.” And maybe that’s where honesty lives, in the unedited, the unrehearsed, the late-night spillage that would humiliate you if anyone saw it—but you show it anyway because you’ve decided humiliation is less dishonest than polish. Sometimes I let the dictionary (French, German, Sanskrit, Nepali)1 open and just copy words, just copy them—they’ll make their own grammar in their own way. That’s called truth’s writing. Writing honesty.

Bad writing is the last honest thing left. It’s what comes out after the margins of meaning have burned down into your late evening notes and you’re still stupidly, beautifully trying to speak. “Good writing,” they said, “needs discipline.” But discipline is just another way of saying don’t leak too much in public. Don’t write honesty... don’t mess up nicely with your bile or organs. I will never stand on someone else’s genre. That’s stupidity. Being a good writer is stupidity. Everything people call “good” turns out to be a kind of lie.

So clean syntax is lying. Calm pacing is lying. Every time I fix a sentence that’s too emotional, too repetitive, too pathetic, I feel like I’m dressing a corpse before the funeral. Do you want that? Me, being dressmaker to corpses? The thing looks nicer, but it’s still dead. So I started wondering what would happen if I stopped embalming the sentences, if I let them rot slowly in their own heat—if I could be a bad writer, the way a wound is bad: festering, alive, refusing to close. Pus need not be healed but worsened more.

That’s what being a bad writer means to me—writing when it hurts, and not cleaning it up. Fill your notes with scumming feeling but not with dancing words. It’s not about style; it’s about refusal. Tell me honestly, who cares about your craft when you’re crawling around your own head looking for a perfect sentence that will finally stop shaking but creating value for herds?2

I think about Artaud sometimes. Everyone says “he was unwell,” and maybe that’s true, but so what? Who isn’t? I am unwell too. You are too. If being well means spelling correctly while you’re falling apart, then maybe the wellness our civilization is creating is wrongly defined. Sanity is just good grammar for the soul. Insanity is the good grammar with truths. Which one do you want me to write then?

And yet, that’s what they keep teaching us: make it neat, make it elegant, make it readable. As if coherence were moral. As if language existed to save us, not to expose us. But coherence is cowardice. Coherence means you’ve already forgiven yourself for the pain. Bad writing doesn’t forgive. It stays open and moral.

To write badly is to write before you understand. When something happens—when someone dies, when someone leaves, when you hurt someone—you can’t make it beautiful right away. If you do, you’re lying. You have to write it before it makes sense, while it’s still bruised and ugly and gasping. You have to let the grammar fall apart because pain doesn’t conjugate neatly. Bad writing is writing before reflection.

I think about Dostoevsky’s late novels3—those feverish monologues that never end, characters ranting for pages, contradictions everywhere. Editors would have cut half of it. But his chaos felt real because life is chaos. He didn’t trim the soul to fit the page. He jammed the whole trembling organism in there, too much breath, too much guilt, too much repetition—and that’s where it touched something human. Crime and Punishment or Anna Karenina—if they would have been published in this modern stupid time, they would have been shredded, half of their essence gone. And The Brothers Karamazov would be 10 pages.

When I read him I want to say—you see? That’s the secret. The badness is the door. Perfection is the lock. Lots of words with raw intentions, not flawless but ongoing psychic jotting—that’s called bad writing, true writing—with no lie.

When Bukowski says “don’t try,”4 he means don’t impersonate yourself. Don’t pretend you’re better than the voice in your gut. He was trying to be Krishna in the battlefield of human edition. I never thought his simplicity was laziness. Now I know more clearly it’s protest. The flatness is the rebellion. He refused to sing when all he had was coughs. I love that bitter whisky-laden cough more than ‘14 Ways of Being Good’ or ‘Let Go Philosophy’—they are all pretentious.

I think the best writers are always a little embarrassed. Artaud, Beckett, Kafka—they wrote from the nerve ends. They didn’t offer answers, just twitching evidence. “This is what it feels like to be crushed between thought and meat,” they said. And there’s something profoundly human about that—to speak even when you know speech will betray you. They never say—Dostoevsky never says—’12 Ways of Being a Good Human’ or ‘5 Best Habits That Can Change Your Life.’

When Beckett wrote ”I can’t go on, I’ll go on,”5 he wasn’t performing paradox. He was writing what every day feels like when you wake up tired of yourself but keep breathing. That’s writing. That’s bad enough to be true.

Now let me enter into the classics. The classics were once considered wrong—too crude, too mystical, too messy. Nietzsche wasn’t doing philosophy; Kierkegaard wasn’t being consistent; Woolf broke form because she couldn’t survive otherwise. Every writer who mattered wrote themselves into disrepute first. Because nothing new begins politely.

If you write and no one calls it ugly, maybe you haven’t gone far enough to write perfectly.

Once, someone told me my writing was “too much.” Too emotional, too fragmented, too self-aware. I smiled and nodded, told them I understood, but later, I realized that “too much” is just what happens when you stop pretending to be digestible. Yes, let me be not too digestible. I never meant to be digested.

So how do you become a bad writer? I don’t know. Do not ever ask me. But remember, my good readers: Bad writing is ugly honesty.

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