“This must be a great place to write!”
People say this if the location we’re in happens to be particularly
stunning in a cultural or natural-wonder sense. People said this to me when I
lived in Paris, because shit, that’s just so interesting, and they said it to
me a lot when I lived in Chamonix, because of this:
In the presence of such natural splendor, I couldn’t help
but be inspired, right? Wrong. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my many
travels, it’s that you can be uninspired anywhere.
People who don’t write act like literary inspiration is
geological in origin. It’s another natural resource to be dug up and exploited,
like petroleum or gold – find a big enough deposit, and you’re Shakespeare.
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| Ta-da! |
I’m not saying there’s no such thing as “good place to write,” because there is. It’s a place where the rent is cheap and there's no cable.
“Sooo…do you, uh, ever publish
any of your articles?”
No, I print them off and wipe my ass with them, champ.
“Wow, you’re just all over the place, aren’t you?”
Said to me with a mix of wonder, condescension and
condescending wonder whenever I mention my Twitter following in an offline
conversation, or whenever I just mention that I’m on Twitter. I don’t have much
of a Twitter following. I have about 1,000 Twitter followers, on a good, zombie-attack-free day, but I guess that’s a
lot for someone no one’s ever heard of and who also doesn’t
follow anyone back.
Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that the person
saying this is always someone who doesn’t use social media at all or they use
it sparingly and they look at those of us who are “always on Facebook” with a
mixture of pity and contempt, because we “can’t hack it in the real world.”
Right, because I write something, throw it up on some backwater blog, and then
wander off to stick my thumb up my ass and twirl while thousands of people magically find what I
wrote all by themselves. That’s how this works.
“Oh, you mean you have paying
work?”
Said in a tone of astonishment when the person I’m talking
to realizes that the “work” I’m always on about is typically done in exchange for
American currency. I don’t know what’s so hard to grasp about the work-money
exchange when the work in question is writing. Restaurant menus; magazine
articles; newspapers; product descriptions; advertisements; corporate
newsletters, websites and blogs; spam emails; user manuals and the instructions
on the back of your gas bill – nobody got paid to write any of those things.
All of those things wrote themselves.
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| Actually, the spam emails probably did write themselves. |
"I have this great idea! You should totally write this!"
Okay, so other people's great ideas are kind of a pet peeve of mine. I have enough great ideas of my own, thanks. It's hard to get with someone else's idea, because it doesn't speak to me and I don't give a fuck. Ideas are like children -- the people who have them always think they're great, because they're theirs. Where you see a special little snowflake, we see a shrieking brat swinging from the ceiling fan, harassing the cat and leaving sticky fingerprints all over our vintage upholstery. Even if your idea really is as great as you think it is, it's yours. You understand it. You see where it's coming from and where it's going and what it needs to do to get there. I don't. Write it yourself.
“Oh, you’re an author?”
No, unfortunately, I am not an author. I say “unfortunately”
because, not only would I totally love to be an author, but also because you know
what an author is. If I were an author, I could say “Yep, I am, I wrote Blah Blah Blah and Yada Yada and This Thing,”
and it would save precious minutes of both of our lives that I must instead spend
explaining what I actually write while you stand there with that “but I thought
all those things wrote themselves” look on your face.
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| Probably still easier than explaining the plot of a story I haven't written, however. |
