original article @: http://inabsentia.bloodlettersink.com...

It's very rare that I tell someone I'm a writer. I can take criticism, I can take the whole 'you're not a *real* writer because a major publishing house hasn't bought your book' thing, I can take the 'It's not a real book if I can only buy it online' routine. I can even take the bitterness of professionals who immediately start telling me to whore myself to agents and write query letters all day long and beg for forgiveness so I can get on a Chapters shelf. I'm confident in where I'm going and in what I'm doing, and I love my freedom. It's a comfortable niche for me. However, what I can't take, and what sticks in my gut like a fourteen day old hamburger left in the sun and eaten on a dare, is this: "Oh, you're a writer? That's nice. I'm writing a book too!"

Now, if I'm in a room full of other writer people and it's a given that most people there are writing books, my bad hamburger queasy hackles don't go up and I'm more than happy to exchange triumphs and woes among the guilty. After all, these people do understand that writing isn't easy. Writing is HARD. It's WORK. So why is it when you tell people you're a writer, suddenly everyone else becomes one too?

It's a strange phenomenon. I do believe it's the only profession where this happens, and I wish I knew why. When someone says they are a surgeon, there are no closet surgeons who claim to be one too. I don't know of anyone dabbling in reconstructive spinal operations on the side. This lack of respect for the writing craft is difficult to define. Singers don't have this issue, nor do visual artists. Why does everyone and their dog want to claim they are a writer?

It is very nice that a common ground tries to be forged, where eager voices tell you how happy they are to hear about your completed book, but their new autobiography is going to rock the world's socks off and how great things are going to go for them, they got an agent waiting on it already, and how they have the whole thing outlined 'in their head'. I tend to stand there during these conversations, thinking, "I didn't write a book because I wanted to one-up you. I wrote a book because I just wanted to write a book." There's this strange competition that happens and I hadn't realized there was a contest. It's no big thing, really, to say that writing a book does take a certain set of skills and a whole lot of discipline and no, not everyone can do it. I can't sing, paint, draw or perform complex acts of neurosurgery. In fact, I pretty much suck at every profession I've had save for writing, and it's possible I suck at the latter most of all. There is always need for improvement. Writing, most of the time, is like bashing your head against a rock in the middle of the desert. You're compelled to do it and there's nobody around you who cares enough to stop you.

Which brings me to my next point, which is that writers tend to be solitary creatures. The live in their heads and they only pop out at odd intervals, act odd, and then dive back into their keyboards and pencilled scribblings. Many writers are arrogant assholes. Because it takes so much discipline and enforced loneliness and hours upon hours to write, most writers are not by nature social butterflies. There are exceptions to this rule, and they are the ones who can schmooze and go to parties and get written up in newspapers and go viral, and I do hate them with my black, oozing liquid charcoaled envy for their relentless PR skills, but the fact is most writers don't get out of their pyjamas unless they are forced to. As I type this article, I'm wearing a 'Still Brewin' t-shirt nightie right this damn second. It kind of goes back to that arrogant asshole comment I made earlier--all this enforced solitude and constant studying of human behaviour can leave you jaded about humanity. You don't want to be a part of it, you want to be outside of it, looking in, taking notes. Learning about people and how they tick and how much they hide when they think they are being genuine can leave you with a profound sense of everything being shit. (It's not true, of course, because the world is reflected through an author filter, especially when said author is writing an apocalypse novel and happy, shiny people aren't going to cut it in character development. This is a warning. You will get affected by what you write.)

Learning is what writers do. They read, they research, they learn, learn, learn. Because you can't write about a cop if you don't know a thing about his day to day job. You can't write about a murderous mortician if you don't know how funeral homes process a human body. Depending on what you're writing about, you may have to learn some extremely disturbing things. If you hate learning, researching, questioning--chances are you won't be writing. If writing essays and research papers in school made you want to drop laxatives into your professor's mocha latte, you won't write a novel. Writing a novel, a series of articles, an autobiography--it's all the same process. There is no magic button. Contrary to advice you may have heard, you can't just turn off your mind and write--you are the sum of what you educate yourself with.

Speaking of sums, there's been a lot of confusion about that among my non-writing writer peers. With the sudden advent of extremely popular authors, read by people who don't usually read, there is this very wrong idea that writers make a lot of money. I can fully attest that this is absolutely NOT true. You will never make money as a writer. Or you could. I know there are entire careers built on the concept that making a living writing is the only way, the only cure and thousands have done it and done it well. My hand is clapping. Awesome. (ed--arrogant asshole writer personality, creeping in). In this world, you won't be considered a professional *anything* until you get paid for it. Even then, it's not enough. Because writing has to be about more than the money. Or, it's all about the money. Writing bends the physics of human expectation, and both of these statements are true. You will never become top in your field no matter how many awards you win, or how many movie deals you seal. That pulitzer? Fucking garbage. Your ego is under constant assault. There will always be another writer who is making more money and/or who writes better than you. There is a constant state of not good enough living in the soul of everyone who writes for a living, and if you're looking for validation, wrap up that bad hamburger and throw it away. Validation does not exist. No matter what your ideals are, they will not be the right ones. Writing for money is crass these days. Writing for your audience is solely attention seeking. Writing for yourself is selfish. Writing for the sake of humanity's greater good is just madman rantings. You can't win.

Frankly, everything about writing secretly pisses people off. It's just about your ego, in the end, isn't it? Hell, if a jerk like you can write a book, why can't they?

The concept of actually working on your cerebral right hook takes on a hazy significance to the uninitiated. After all, to those who don't write, it's easy. Everyone knows the alphabet. You, big shot writer loser who has a minimum wage job to get by, you don't know nothing about writing. That book you say you wrote? Pish. Anyone can write that. Look at *my* book. It's a story about my life as a guy who built up a ball point pen empire and it's riveting! My book is going to be so much better than yours!

Look, I know I sound like a bitter bitch. It's very nice that you're also working on a book (pasted on, YAAY!). It's not that I don't care you are writing the next biggest seller since the Bible and it's as complex as the Upanishads--I want to know you're serious and not just on an ego high to play one-up on this dishevelled writery writer asshole you know who just wanted to buy a burger and fries. So, yes, I will ask questions about your book and demand to see chapters when they're finished, and I *will* help and guide you if you honestly are working on something and I think it has promise. But if it stays in your head and all I get is "Yeah, I haven't had time to write it out, but I got a callback from that publisher..." Well, I'm gonna smile and call bullshit and leave it at that.

After all, I don't have much time myself these days. I'm writing a book too.