1. Abandon all dignity.
No one wants to read about the time you drank an Odwalla juice while you walked a dog with your hymen intact. People want to read about you drinking a bottle of Robitussin while sitting on a pizza box before your body parts graphically interact with someone else’s. If you sell your secrets, they will come, but only if you do it in an offhand, distanced, self-deprecating way. Don’t come in there saying you tried to kill yourself and you learned a lot about bravery. Talk about the time your dick went limp and then you watched a repeat of “News Radio.” Detail is important in dignity loss. Triumph is not.

2. Confused about how to make it interesting? Put it in How-to format.
You can tell a story in a linear way with a cool 1st or 3rd-person-omniscient narrator, or you could be like “fuck that.” Instead, tell the story in a how-to format that ridicules the idea of how-tos. One minute you’re immersing your reader in how to visit an aquarium, the next minute they’re in a 2nd-person tale of mega mall molestation. Whoa.

3. Take something boring and make it absurd
Did you watch a TV show? Well, you can write about that. Eat a pizza crust off the floor? That too! First, pretend you are an alien or at least a really snarky person. If you chose the first, overexplain it so that people think, whoa, that really IS weird. “A nose is a protrusion sitting at the center of a face. It has small hairs at its entrance points.” Kinda like that. If you chose the snarky route, make sure you know what you’re talking about. Find some syllogism with which to analyze dumb thing, a la Chuck Klosterman. If you don’t know how, or if you really have nothing to say, try the alien perspective instead.

4. Create a mini-meme
People like “themes” or “groupings” or even segments that are easily replicable. Come up with a format that everyone else can easily copy (stock photos with funny captions has been done) and watch it magically spread!

5. Prepare to lose a few friends
When you engage in step 1, you might want to disclose icky, yucky or even awky things about the people around you. After all, they too had a hand in you losing your dignity. No one will like what you write about them, unless you write that they are skinny, pretty, tan, rich or other boring things, but those nice compliments do not a good story make. The more people know that your creative writing is making the people in your life uncomfortable, they more they relish in it.

–Becky Lang might write a part two after more careful analysis of Thought Catalog and this very blog you are reading