People keep asking me the difference between what I do for a living and what a “regular” writer does, whatever regular means in this context. You would think I should know, because for my whole life I have been a writer. It has been my life’s blood, my life’s work, or as my father once said to me in one rare moment of actual admiration – the only, in fact, but memorable – he saw me sitting at my little Olivetti type-writer and said to me that I had a gift. He said exactly, “You just sit over the typewriter and open a vein.”
He meant this in a good way, i assure you. He meant that i write from the heart, though the image itself is, i would agree, rather gruesome. More, the quote sounded familiar even then, so I’m not even sure that these were his own words. All I can tell you with certainty are the words he said to me, be they his or plagiarized (likely), he meant them and it was a rare and unusual compliment and the first and the last.
he was right, of course. Any good real writer, any one who wants to truly become a writer and isn’t just screwing around with a dull journal and does not write every day does not qualify because a true writer will view his or her work as a type of calling or ministry. It is what you do, what you are, what you consume and what consumes you. Writer’s Block is an invention, you think. IT is for people who are afraid to face the blank page and a real writer will face the blank page every single day and will never leave a day entirely blank, even if what you write is absolute nonsense, you will write. You will, as author and friend Harry Mathews once wrote and said and entitled a book, you will write “Twenty Lines a Day.” It doesn’t matter what it’s about, just as long as you write something.
In Harry’s case, he wrote twenty lines a day and more and took his yellow legal pad with his pencil writing to a publisher and voila, it was published. It was published because Harry had a good gimmick with the title, but more, and the real reason, is that Harry has a gift and when he writes about ordinary things, they become precious in his hands. A morning cup of coffee becomes a ritual, a thing to hold with reverence.
Article comments
1 - Temple Stark
So would this technical writing be the fulltime job you're looking for (I'm jumping a thread)
2 - sadi
exactly, Temple: technical writing or any other kind really, but i do a great deal of medical/technical and software, computer work. So in any of those fields...
thanks for reading and for comments on other. sorry to hear about your brother... but glad you can empathize with my work. i hope this helps somewhat... it's always good to have friends in the neighborhood, ya know.
cheers, and keep the faith.
sade
3 - DrPat
I've heard over and over, writers write. It's important to widen that definition, because many blog writers do put out 20 lines a day - of chat. Of photo captions (with or without images). Of "Hi, Mom!"s and "Ewwww!"s and "Click here"s.
What makes the distinction between these folks and the writer is what Sadi has spelled out here. Writers write things worth reading; writers communicate more than the superficial meaning of their text.
Writers are artists in this sense; they give us a view we could see for ourselves, but add that je ne sais quois which, without their art, we would never notice.
4 - sadi
exactly, having something to say is key. one would never dream of calling him or herself a sailor if s/he did not know how to sail, yet many feel fine calling themselves writers without really knowing the craft - . It's odd. I'm not saying I'm all that - i think only time will bear that out. I think the real test is in work that is lasting and that stands the test of time and is as important twenty years from now as it is twenty minutes from now.
If you can't say that it will be - then i think we have our answer there. Just my opinion, but for what it's worth...
thanks for reading,
s.r.p.