Since Joe asked, the list of things I did while at home for the holidays was pretty much the same as his, except substitute “drinking” and “shopping” for “thinking” and “playing Flash games”. But if that seems to put me in agreement with him about the relative weight writing should occupy in a “writer’s” life, the truth is a little more complicated, because yes, I also did some writing over the break, and yes, I think that’s kind of important.

Incidentally, Joe’s post is set up so that anybody who disagrees with him is “a pretentious asshole” who is probably “crazy” and can get “screwed” — a covert sort of ad hominem attack that, BTW and IMHO, is the reason public discourse these days is so vitriolic and useless, but that’s by the by — so it’ll be an uphill battle to articulate my disagreement in a way that doesn’t sound pretentious and assholish, and that’s not one of my strong suits anyway, so I apologize in advance.

But anyway: I don’t think that one must “need to write” in order to “be” a writer. Indeed, I would tend more towards the brute empiricist side of the spectrum and say that the most important criterion for “being” a writer is that your work is regularly published (by other people) and regularly results in monetary gain (however modest); otherwise you’re just a waiter/teacher/whatever who’s trying to be a writer. (For the record, I don’t tend to think of myself as a writer, and I doubt I ever will unless I have some measure of success at it.)

This may seem like a fairly punctilious quibble, but let’s be honest: a guy working a desk job who writes short stories from to time is not recognizably a writer in the same way that, say, Bukowski was — but the reason we call Bukowski a writer is that he published five dozen (!!!) books, not because he “needed” to write.

Still, I’ll come out and say it: I feel like I need to write sometimes, and often even when I’m doing something else I’ll be thinking about what I will write when I next sit down. But that “need” is only partly about instincts or deep personal truths or whatever; just as much it’s about recognizing that I will never be a writer — at least not by my definition — if I don’t work my ass off at it: Bukowski didn’t get to be so prolific because he watched the Gilmore Girls all the time. That doesn’t mean he never “had fun” — he was a drunk and a womanizer, too! — and it doesn’t mean that, if the Gilmore Girls is your drug of choice, you can’t watch that sometimes and still be a writer; the idea that “being a writer” means you must never do anything else has more to do with over-simplified first-world identity politics than it does with the actual realities of writerdom.

If you’re not writing a lot of the time, though, then I’m sorry, but I’m dubious. It strikes me as glibber to insist you’re a writer because you write occasionally, in between all your other pastimes, than to insist you’re a writer because you feel a “need” to write, and I wonder why you would even want to be a writer (or call yourself one) if you don’t regularly feel that “need” — and revel in it when you do.

Then again, I’m kind of a pretentious asshole.

Tags:   Andrew · writers · writers' habits1 Comment