From the archives of the Write Stuff
As you probably know, each Sunday I write an article for the Write Stuff website. It's always been my intention to repost these articles on my own site, after allowing a sufficient length of time to elapse. This is my very first article for the site, from November 11, 2007. The original text can be found here.
Truth is often duller than fiction…
I have only recently begun to call myself “a writer”. Previously it was a title I shied away from. Sure, it was something I wanted to be, someday, perhaps, if I had the time, but it was not how I earned a living, so I never felt I was justified in saying that it is was what I did.
I have got over that now, and whenever people ask what I do, I tell them that I am a writer.
People have some very strange ideas about what a writer is like. Some assume I lead a glamorous life of book launches and society parties, that I spend my nights sat round dinner tables making humorous quips, like a modern day Oscar Wilde. Others imagine that there is something wrong with me, that I am a disturbed and twisted individual, especially when they find out the kind of things I write about. After all, what sort of a person would spend so much time envisaging new and interesting ways to kill people, and how to evocatively describe that?
I have an active imagination, but that does not mean I have anything wrong with me. And while I can come up with the odd humorous observation, you need to give me a few hours’ advance notice, and several attempts. My life, like those of the vast majority of writers, is perfectly normal. I eat, I sleep, sometimes I go to the cinema, I watch TV. I have hobbies, I go running. I talk to friends and generally “hang out”. I even have a regular, normal job! In addition to all this, sometimes I invent entire lives, entire worlds, and commit them to paper. In all other respects, I am just like everyone else.
But to those who do not write, we appear different. Very different.
I know who I blame for this perception of the writer – writers themselves!
The public perception of writers, as with the public perception of many professions, is disproportionately influenced by fiction. And who is more responsible for fictional portrayals than writers?
Think of some recent examples of writers in fiction. The character of Hank Moody in Californication, or how about Melvin in As Good As It Gets? Fascinating characters, but as human beings they are complete train-wrecks! This is hardly representative of the average writer, but well within the popular conception of the writer as a dissolute wastrel.
Every profession gets stereotyped, but writers are unique in that we control the stereotype, and appear to perpetuate it. And probably with good reason. If a writer writes about a writer, then that character is going to have to be pretty interesting, because I do not know anyone who has the patience to sit through page after page of “Paul sits in front of his laptop, typing away. Sometimes he makes some coffee. Scene continues for the next several hours…”
The fact that these characters are writers is incidental to the story being told about them. They could belong to any profession. But somewhere along the lines I think that detail gets lost, and people confuse the character’s personality with the incidental detail of the character’s profession, and then that becomes fixed in their mind as what a writer is like.
So, how do people react to you when you tell them that you are a writer? What is the strangest assumption people have made about you because you write?
