COLUMN: It’s the write thing
It’s the right thing
I’m know I’m going out on a limb by saying this, but there probably are too many writers. Yeah, I know your saying, “at least one too many.”
Fair enough; I would have gone into television, but I couldn’t afford the orthodontia or the hair styling. Radio was out because I couldn’t get the five-pack-a-day husky voice down.
I’m sorry, this is exactly the type of crapola you’re going to get from writers. Writing is the noblest of professions blah, blah, blah. I’m suffering for my blah, blah art and blah, blah nobody appreciates me blah. But don’t get me wrong, I worship the water and the little people Bryant Gumbal walks on. If I could make the money David Letterman makes promoting stupid pet tricks, I’d be on the next flight out of here.
Writers like themselves so much they end up writing about themselves. Did you ever notice how many movies and books have story lines which include writers? Just about every movie has some angst-ridden twit with writer’s block. Even Basic Instinct had to slip a writing theme in along with the overpowering sex and violence.
Then there are also the hundreds of movies about the people who “have a book inside them trying to get out.” I have effectively avoided this problem and so can you. The next time you go into the dentist, have the hygienist reach down your throat with that saliva sucker and have the book removed – the rest of your life will be much more comfortable.
If that doesn’t work, read what writers have:
“Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty,” Lillian Hellman.
“Great writers are always evil influences; second-rate writers are not wicked enough to become great,” George Bernard Shaw.
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master,” Ernest Hemingway.
“Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money,” J.P. Donleavy.
“You can recover from the writing malady only by falling mortally ill and dying,” Jules Renard.
“Writing … keeps me from believing everything I read,” Gloria Steinem.
“This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane,” Kurt Vonnegut.
“Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters – not so much above the clatter as part of it,” Saul Bellow.
“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery,” George Orwell.
“Most writers are in a state of gloom a good deal of the time; they need perpetual reassurance,” John Hall Wheelock.
“I have spent half my life trying to get away from journalism, but I am still mired in it – a trade and habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world full of misfits, drunkards and failures. A group photo of the top 10 journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness,” Hunter S. Thompson.
“You think about what actually happened, you tell your friends long stories about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure, then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the typewriter, or the writing notebook, and get it over with as fast as you can,” Jack Kerouac.