jackb
what is a writer anyway
when i was a kid and teachers asked me what i wanted to be when i grew up, i used to say i wanted to be an author. i mean, i also said a cop and an astronaut and a farmer and a fireman and all sorts of other things, but i usually said i wanted to be an author.
when i was a teenager, my guidance counselor asked me what i wanted to get a degree in. not really knowing how to politely say “i don’t want a degree, i want a house and fulfilling hobbies”, or else “i would prefer if my wife was the breadwinner”, i briefly reflected on which classes i had found enjoyment in, if any, and recalled that i felt the best about my work when i was getting an essay grade back. those classes had been history classes where we talked about changing political systems and about philosophy more broadly. my parents had not so subtlely pushed me towards thinking about law school a few weeks prior, so i figured political science would be a good way to combine those things. at the very least i should learn something marketable.
next came the issue of actually picking out a university to attend. my parents spent a lot of money and energy on putting me in the schools where i had the best opportunities available, and i had always done well enough to make them not regret it. now, at the ripe old age of 16, it was dawning on me in real terms that i actually had to do some legwork to advance my life. so i filled out a not-quite form-fillable application and sent it to a few schools i had briefly googled, and they seemed alright enough anyway. they were names i had heard before at least. i was told it was also important to think about what schools would be a “good fit”, somewhere i actually wanted to be, not just the name at the top of my eventual degree. frankly, i couldn’t be bothered. i was 16. all my energy was devoted to keeping my gpa afloat, playing league of legends, and stewing about being a virgin - all things i could accomplish anywhere.
one college i was looking at offered me the option to take a year off and start with them the following fall. i was intrigued, but couldn’t be bothered with doing the research on what a gap year would really entail in my case. fortunately the choice was taken away from me when an end-of-year speech from one of my teachers somehow moved me enough to make me sure that i wanted to be in a classroom and do great things. so i decided to take the straight and narrow instead.
the path of least resistance took its course and i landed in my 100 level classes. i was shocked to discover that political science is a university code word for bureaucrat training. this is perhaps my fault - i had done as little research as was physically possible before committing to this path - but it still felt like a betrayal. or false advertising. whichever. what writing was available to me was mostly in the form of short responses to questions for which we had already been given the answers in lecture. what specific kind of game theory model is this? how come this amendment is written this way? what is the tragedy of the commons? in a shakespeare class i took for a gened requirement, i was able to write essays, such that they were. for the third or fourth time in my academic life, i was confronted with such thought provoking questions as “isn’t hamlet’s life fucked up?” and “do you think it’s racist for iago to be mean to othello?” once again, following the trend from high school, the absolute best any of us could even theoretically do was present a mechanically sound and generally comprehensible rehashing of the same essays the professor read every semester. nothing new was created, even if we were good at writing essays. most of us were not.
the problem was that this work was ostensibly what i should have wanted to be doing, even though it obviously wasn’t. i wanted to write something new. i wanted to learn something new. the university is supposed to be the place where you specialize, learn, and above all, create. what i had in mind was maybe learning a thing or two, reading a book i hadn’t read before for example, and then using the content to go on and do my thing. instead i found myself in “high school 2: now it’s expensive”.
over time, the gap between what i was doing and what i wanted to be doing grew more and more impossible to span psychologically, even with the assistance of psychoactive drugs and a constant stream of social functions. the problem of course was that i didn’t really know what i wanted to do instead. my major choice, and really university as a whole, was already a compromise from my adolescence. the only thing i could think of was how offensive my coursework felt. here were courses i was taking because they constituted a writing requirement, but the only writing i did was the humanities equivalent of taking the derivative of a function x. it was a set of benchmarks installed to ensure i wasn’t too much of a slack-jawed dunce to make the business i attended too embarrassed to continue taking my money. there was no creation, no expression, no revelation or discussion in it. just rote memorization of the bare minimum necessary skills to show the person reading my writing that i was an adult with an accordingly appropriate command of the english language.
the options for escaping this were meager. i could pivot to creative writing, put up with even more laughable standards of quality, and run the risk of not immediately being recognized as the next great novelist of our age. the other option was full-on english, which is in many ways doomed to be more of the same memorization and regurgitation. this was no clearer than when considering career paths, where getting enough inconsequential accolades to eventually replace my teachers seemed like the most likely endpoint.
i did, of course, wind up taking the second option anyway, and it has actually improved my relationship with school, but i think it’s mostly because in the interim, i’ve discovered what i actually want to do, and how little it rubs shoulders with anything resembling a legitimate institution.
when i was a kid i wanted to be an author. that’s still true, except i’m not brave or confident enough to commit to a whole book. i’d much rather write something here or there when i can. the trick is to convince someone with lots of money to give me some in return for the writing that i do. obviously everybody would like that job; i’m sure even people who don’t have an interest in writing would love to make a decent living for putting out a couple thousand words one or two times a month. so it’s not so simple as realizing you’d like to be a columnist or a commentator or whatever it is. most people who have those kinds of gigs don’t really call themselves anything but writers anyway. the important thing for them is that they write in some generative capacity, and that they’re good enough at it to get by.
this is what being a writer is, i think. it’s basically a hobby, only unlike being into model trains or skiing, calling yourself a writer puts you in the same category as people like hemingway and newton and dostoevsky and plato. it also doesn’t really mean anything in particular. if you tell someone you’re a salesman, it means you sell things. it could be any product, and you could have any clientele, but the function and format are largely the same. if you say that you’re a writer, it could mean almost anything. nyt editors are writers, but so are philosophers. you could do intensive research and peer review, but you could just as easily write copy for the sides of boxes of cheerios. it doesn’t really matter. i think that’s why people use this term ‘writer’ instead of something more specific. you see it all over people’s social media bios. this guy’s a contributor to the atlantic. that guy’s a writer, and you can buy a book they co-wrote on amazon with this link. the only people who call themselves authors are people who do books full time. most people in this circle of the world, though, they’re just writers. whatever that means.