At the risk of sounding like I'm harping on Thought Catalog too much lately, I think I finally figured out what the problem is over there. It's not that they're all bad writers, although many of them are, it's just that they're really bad at writing about being a writer. I think it's possible that some of them literally do not know what it is that a "writer" actually does. For many of these straw-people I'm inventing on the spot, a writer isn't someone who does, meaning a person who writes, it's a person who is, meaning, tits-around the world tilting at content mills, writerly.
A real writer, I also think it should be pointed out, spends most of his time complaining about other writers.
Let's take a look at the latest nugget of wisdom I stumbled over in this otherwise fine enough piece Jeffrey Eugenides Is Not A Homophobe, Idiots. The blogger makes some decent points in the argument about a kerfuffle Eugenides got into when he made a gay joke, (by which I mean a literary joke, but it was also coincidentally about homosexuality), but that's not really important at the moment for our purposes here. Instead, this is the part that turned my threadbare writer hat sideways as I sit here in a Parisian flat shivering and chain-smoking cigarettes while pining away for a lost age of romance.
First of all, I’m compelled to establish this most important fact that the whole world probably needs to know anyway:
It’s a rare writer that actually knows how to tell a joke out loud. Writers’ minds are so thickly clogged by self-centered musings about our own imaginary worlds that the charisma and overall social awareness required in order to perform a joke smoothly is plain and simply not at our disposal. There is a reason we chose a vocation that mostly entails suffering alone in front of a computer at strange hours. When I try my hand in the company of funny people, my jokes get cringes, seldom laughs. Maybe a sympathetic hand on the shoulder. Let’s fight for marriage equality but let’s also work on a social revolution where writers are globally cut some slack for the appalling degree of their social awkwardness.I think maybe you're confusing the part with the whole, but ok. It's a natural symptom of the internet age to adopt the pose first and fill in the blanks later, but writing isn't a passive role one plays in the world's shitty melodrama, it's an active, or at least reactive one. (See how easy it is to sound ridiculous writing about this stuff? And I'm only 40% stupid). It feels like instead of reading a few hundred books and sort of intuiting the details themselves, a lot of these kids filled in their concept of what being a writer means from a Mark Ruffalo film, and while that joke isn't necessarily grade A material, I am pretty sure I could somehow muster the courage to speak it aloud in front of other human people without crumbling into a pile of speckled dust and quill feathers.
brought to you by
3 comments:
Whoa a TLDR within a TLDR. This is like some Inception shit.
Haha, well met, sir.
TC;DR
Post a Comment