After years as a writer and raconteur, John Waters has a talk for just about every occasion.

At Christmastime, he tells audiences how to get through the holidays. On Valentine’s Day, he gives advice on how to get laid. Around his birthday last year, he gave interviews about how to avoid becoming an “old fart.”

Assigned on Thursday night to welcome a ballroom full of writers and educators to one of the nation’s largest writers’ conferences, Waters gave his listeners exactly what they wanted to hear: tips on becoming a successful writer and knowing when they’re on their way.

“Somebody has to notice and react to the first thing you write, somebody besides your mother and the person you’re f*cking,” he told the audience. “When you get your third reader, your writing career begins.”

Waters was the keynote speaker for The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) 2026 Conference and Bookfair, which has brought an estimated 10,000 attendees to Baltimore from March 4 to 7.

The event has been described as one of the largest gatherings of writers in the United States, a can’t miss weekend for the literary community. Waters’ talk was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University, which is marking its 150^th anniversary this year and has the second oldest degree-granting creative writing program in the nation. Besides directing 16 movies, including “Hairspray” and “Pink Flamingos,” and writing 10 books, Waters is a Baltimore native, current resident and one of its biggest boosters.

Addressing hundreds of writers in the largest ballroom at the Baltimore Convention
Convention Center, Waters gave one of his patented spoken-word performances, specifically tailored to a crowd of writers and educators. As one might expect from the author of a book titled “Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder,” his talk mixed humorous anecdotes with serious advice for the writers, which he called “the toughest audience of all.”

Waters, 79, began by recounting how he started as a writer and storyteller. He confessed that he didn’t initially read a lot the way some children do. When he started school, he said, he encountered a barrier that he considered “the enemy of reading”: book reports.

Waters said he wasn’t interested in reading about Benjami Franklin and his kite. He preferred to read about hot rods, but the “mind-numbing educators” didn’t have a copy of that book in the school library then. He said he believes that schools should give a kid any book he asks for. “If he’s 14 years old and he’s heard of the Marquis de Sade, he’s old enough to read it,” he said. “If a preteen girl wants a copy of ‘Story of O’ instead of ‘Little Women,’ that’s her choice.“

Waters said Life Magazine “corrupted me” at a young age by introducing him to topics such as homosexuality and drug addiction. He said he wrote his first puppet show when he was 11 and had a pretty good career as a puppeteer for children’s birthday parties “until I made the shoe fit one of the step sisters instead of Cinderella.”

From that experience as a writer and entertainer, he said, he realized that writing was a way to cause trouble, to get people to laugh, to change their minds and make a living. When he was a junior counselor at a summer camp, he wrote a horror story to tell around the fire before the campers went to sleep. He said some of the campers complained that his story gave them nightmares and that got around camp. “My own parents were put on alert that something might be wrong with my imagination,” he said.

Instead of getting him to tone it down, the campers’ complaints had the opposite effect.

“Presto! I was controversial for once,” Waters said. “I felt happily judged.”

In his Catholic high school, he said, he become “a loud-mouth trouble maker in class, cracking jokes, making fun of religion.” He was also becoming an avid reader – William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, The 120 Days of Sodom – and he had a vision of his future.

“I wanted to be filthy,” he said. “I wanted to be a nutcase intellectual…I wanted to make people laugh.”

The first work of writing that he had published, he said, was a letter to the editor of Life Magazine in 1962, sticking up for Andy Warhol’s work. “I always thought a good homework assignment for young kids was to see who could be the first in the class to get a letter to the editor printed” in a magazine.

The first time he got paid for an article, he said, was when he earned $100 for a piece in Fact magazine titled “Inside an Unwed Mother’s Home.” The magazine only wanted true accounts, he said, but his story was made up.

Next came his underground movies, which led to his career as a writer and filmmaker.

“I never made a movie I didn’t write,” he said. “I never would.”

Here are a few takeaways from Waters’ keynote speech, which lasted nearly 40 minutes.

Read, read, read: Waters said he has 13,546 books in his personal collection. He also collects porn versions of classic book titles to keep in his bookcases alongside the actual book, including Some Like it Hard and Clitty Clitty Bang Bang. He has more than 100 books with the word ‘chicken’ in the title, including Glory Hole Chicken, Chain Gang Chicken and Golden Shower Chicken.

No John jokes: One genre he does not collect, he said, is “Jokes at the John”-type books. Due to his “scatological reputation,” he said, he once got a serious offer to write a John Waters John book. He said he got as far as thinking of a title: Wiping Issues: You’re Not Alone.”

He’s not much of a TV watcher: “I like being on TV, but I don’t know how to turn on my TV….It’s too hard.”

President Donald Trump’s most impeachable offense: The firing of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

Get the plot right: In Hollywood, they say the first 10 pages of a movie script are what get a movie green-lit, because that’s what studio executives read, he said. The last 10 pages are what make it a hit because “that’s where the word of mouth begins as the audience is leaving he theater.”

Editing advice: “No comedy should be longer than 90 minutes,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a really long joke.”

Mix it up: Waters is known as a writer who doesn’t like to repeat himself. “Multiple Maniacs” was a horror movie, he said. “Pink Flamingos” was a black comedy. “Female Trouble” was a biopic. “Hairspray” was a dance movie. “Cry-Baby” was a musical. The point is, he didn’t repeat himself.

The role of drugs in his writing: “At first I was on pot,” he said. “I always smoked dope before I sat down to write…We were never on drugs when we made the films but I was on drugs when I thought them up.” After he achieved a measure of success, he said, he stopped doing drugs: “It’s usually the other way around.”

Don’t let up: “I write every day, Monday to Friday, still.” he said. “My job has always been to think of f*cked-up things i...

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