1. Everybody writes. Everybody. The teenage
girl whose Tumblr squashes sporadic paragraphs between reblogged photos, and
the forty-year-old man whose job becomes unspeakably insignificant as his 400-page
manuscript awaits much groveling at Random House are barely distinguishable in
the judgements made on them by society. The toughest, most soul-crushing stage
of being a writer is probably the effort put into not being defined by either
stereotypes. (As a matter of perfect coincidence, both have made adequately
prolific comments on society.)
2. The word “submission”
induces a frustrating bout of writers’ block potentially
lasting for years. “We want writing that’s quirky,” “ we look for short stories
full of gut-wrenching soul,” “our subject matter embodies the glacial attitudes
of the bourgeoisie”; every submission guideline ever read - even “we require
experience and a $3 postage fee” compels you to mentally scream “YES, that’s
me! I can write for that!” On average it takes less than a minute to realise
that you were lying. You have your imagined prominence as contributor for the
publication in question all figured out, in one swift move accelerating past
the ideas for subject matter, articulation of thoughts and stylistic refinement
that should technically come first. But hey, who needs the bureaucratic
‘creative process’ when you have ambition?
3. Blogs that are
non-literary render you groggy. It could be down to
the dissent of - yet ultimately successful
- command of syntax, or the “professional” look of their page, or the blatant
milestones in the field of readership and pageviews, but something about a
fashion blog run by a high-school student who is languidly torn between an
internship at Elle or Vogue leaves you in a stuporous revelation that her
present is far brighter than your future. You blame the ease of fame that comes
with blogging under such a popular genre, but secretly you’re just a little bit
upset because clearly nobody has an interest in your acclaim for J.D. Salinger
post-Catcher in the Rye. The moment
quickly preludes the impulse to become a fashion blogger yourself - an idea soon put to bed by the realisation
that most garments have to be identified as plural on your watch.
4. People actually forget
that you want to be perceived as a writer. Unless
you were born with just initials instead of a first and middle name, your
chosen identity as a wordsmith will nearly always omitted in conversation,
particularly when your self-esteem depends on it. Singers, guitarists and
dancers get a standing ovation, artists have their exhibitions, or at least the
prospective abundance of ‘likes’ should work make its way to the internet, and
then there are the unpublished writers, who are lucky if their names and
ill-thought-out poetry are printed in the school writing magazine (the audience
of which is solely made up of its editors) and have zealous thoughts on the
symbolic significance of Gatsby’s swimming pool treated with an air of “save it
for the English books, honey.” If you’re really
lucky, the attitudes of others can transition from condescension to awkward,
half-hearted acknowledgement.
5. You strive to be a
conversational thesaurus. It is down to the feeling
that you lack profundity and story-telling skills that are responsible for
spawning the idea that it will be easier to become F. Scott Fitzgerald than
Ernest Hemmingway (just for a second allow yourself to imagine that the
former’s books lack substance). It becomes a genuine fear of yours that the
phrase “a good vocabulary doesn’t necessarily mean good writing” might actually
catch on as a cornerstone for criticism.
6. Thanks to you, Moleskine
will never go out of business. There’s something
about the (frankly too thin) sallow pages with unicolour minimalism for a cover
that commands the desire of nearly every writer, and has somehow reserved a
perfect rectangular spot in every weathered satchel from day one. It suddenly
becomes not a question of what brand of notebook but instead the choice of hard
or soft cover that serves as a key point in defining your personality. The
elastic band that firmly snaps the 100-or-so pages shut allows your Moleskine
to serve as a quaint yet unsightly breeding ground for crumpled excerpts of
spontaneity and stained pieces of parchment-thick paper. And you’re truly naïve
if you think it stops at the purchase of one Moleskine; soon enough you’ll have
a small soft-covered one for epigrams, a large hard-covered ones for critical
works, and that fiery red one will be reserved for impassioned sonnets, ballads
and sensationalist novellas that fail to ever materialise.
7. Chances are, you already
have a complex about your level of ability. Rejection
is a state of being that every writer is expected to be a calm acquaintance of,
when in reality it can crush all emotional stability with immediate, sustained
effect. You firmly uphold the belief that you epitomise all human inarticulacy,
while simultaneously sending every piece of work to a friend over Skype.
Fortunately your chosen means of communication allow for a limitless stream of
self-deprecation to ensue. Repertoire of statements range from “it’s really
nothing special,” to “oh my gosh I can feel myself physically cringing upon
re-reading this,” to the heightened implausibility of “oops sorry I really
didn’t mean to send that.” Punctuation is not necessary in any of these as an
instinctive interjection of “haha” after certain words work with equal, if not
greater efficacy. It appears that most writers challenged by their precarious
level of success and praise from others steep themselves in this dramatised
paradox of maintaining this intellectual frustration whilst somehow using the
word “intellectual” to describe their own experiences. On the bright side, such
quasi-depression is writing gold.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that “If they’re any good, [writers are] a whole lot of people
trying so hard to be one person.” Now, my own proficiency in the world of
literature renders me an all but credible interpreter of what the voice of an
age has to say, but I’m pretty sure this statement is applicable beyond our
attempts at characterisation. We are the introverts that crave attention, the
mavericks that knowingly buy into a uniform brand of notebook, and the (albeit
slight) neurotics who scrape by in balancing diffidence with abject egotism.
Ultimately, we know that our pen name has to amount to one definite
person. That is, if we want its appearance to make it past the manuscript
stage.
