8 Re-Interpreted Signs That You Were Meant to Be A Writer

typeCN0047Earlier this evening there was a tweet going around, linking to “8 Signs That You Were Meant to Be a Writer.” Of course I clicked over to read the eight signs. I like to see how predictable I am sometimes.

Sadly, I didn’t really like the list and explanations. It’s not that they were wrong, necessarily, but it was all sort of drippy and sappy and the explanations for each item were not really explanations at all. It talked about things like secret dreams (about writing) and excuses (for writing instead of doing other things) and yearning (to write). Which is not to say that these things are NOT signs that you were meant to be a writer. I’m not trashing the article. However, I believe the interpretations were slightly off the mark and I have re-interpreted them in what I think are more realistic terms here.*

1. Secret Dreams. Yes, writers have secret dreams. Sometimes they are even about writing. More often they are about quitting the day job, writing the next breakout novel, or even just getting something published so that your family and friends will stop calling you a “writer” in quotation marks and you can stop feeling guilty about all that money you spent on books, workshops, and computer software for writers.

2. Doubt. Absolutely. Doubt is always sticking its head in at the door and saying “Excuse me, loser, but I thought you should know that last paragraph you wrote is absolutely dreadful, that character is so wooden you should name him Pinocchio, and the plot is so full of holes that you could strain jelly through it.” Is doubt a sign that you’re meant to be a writer? Maybe. Because a lot of people who obviously aren’t meant to be writers don’t seem to have any doubt about it at all.

3. Excuses. I have to do laundry. I have to clean the house. I have to make cookies for the school bake sale. I have to exercise now. I have to scour the bathroom cupboards with an old toothbrush and then paint the barn. I have to redesign my website. I have to use social media for the next four hours to promote my writing career. Okay, excuses: check.

4. Inspiration. If you were meant to be a writer, you probably have a love/hate relationship with inspiration. You know that you can’t always wait for it, and that you must learn to work without it or create your own. But it does come to you at times. Usually when you’re driving on a four-lane highway, taking kids to a birthday party, having an emergency meeting with your boss, or giving birth.

5. Perfectionism. If you’re meant to be a writer, perfectionism will always occur in inverse proportion to the amount that is required in a given situation. You’ll think your sucky first draft is good enough and send it to an editor when it’s still so rough it will scratch the editor’s eyeballs. On the other hand, you’ll rewrite, edit, tweak and polish your novel so much in search of perfection that it will start to wear thin and you’ll never send it out.

6. Admiration. You’ll admire other writers, of course. You’ll admire their writing style, their relationship with their adoring fans, their ability to support themselves with their writing, and the wonderful way they “pay it forward” by taking fledgling writers (not you, of course) under their wing and helping THEM become successful, too. Oh, wait. I was thinking of jealousy.

7. Lacking. When you don’t write, you feel like something is missing. But sometimes when you do write, you also feel like something is missing, because it was something you were supposed to do (go to work? feed the kids?) during the time you spent writing. You could end up lacking a job, a family, or a place to live. Oops. Yes, lacking is often a large part of being a writer.

8.Yearning. Yearning to write. Didn’t we cover this in number 1? And possibly number 7 as well? Okay, yes, writers have yearnings. To write, and sometimes to not write. To find perfection, and sometimes to have someone come in and just fix the whole damn mess for you, slap your name on it and call it a day. To have an unlimited supply of chocolate and caffeine, a brilliant idea, and an all-expenses paid week-long writing retreat? Yearning. Oh yeah.

So…are you meant to be a writer? If you’ve read this far, it’s quite probable, because you’re likely supposed to be editing that novel right now…

*Sometimes I write things that I think are funny. If you don’t agree, you don’t have to tell me about it. Just move along, folks, move along.

The Awesome and Terrible Power of Words

papercrumpleAs a writer, I’m very aware of the power of words. I hope to write things that harness and use that power, whether I want to make my readers laugh, cry, think, feel–I know that with the right words, I can make any of that happen. I work hard to find those right words, even when they seem unattainable.

I know that it takes hard work to arrive at the “right” words. We write, and then we write again, and then we write again, hoping that each draft brings us closer to the goal. Even then we rewrite, edit, tweak, and sometimes cut out large swathes of the words we had previously worked so hard on, that seemed so right at the time, and replace them with something that works better now. And maybe we finally arrive at the point where we think it’s “right,” and others agree, and we publish it, and there it is, all printed and official and real. Powerful. Persuasive. Permanent.

And then we read it later–maybe years later–and see how we could have made it better. Or we read it and realize that it’s dated, or we got something wrong, or things just didn’t turn out the way we had envisioned. This can be particularly true for science fiction writers. It doesn’t mean our words or the story they told were not good at the time. But if we were writing the same thing today, with today’s knowledge and understanding and context, we would write it differently. Verne’s From the Earth to The Moon might seem silly now because we know that we can’t travel to the moon by being shot from a cannon–and yet it is not completely without value. It remains fun to read as a product of its time, and it inspired Tsiolkovsky to develop his theory of spaceflight. It has been outdated in some ways, but still forms the foundation of what followed.

Sometimes we have to accept that our words–or words we love, or which have great importance for us–get it wrong, or become outdated, or lose some portion of their value. Maybe it’s a function of the time they were written in; maybe it’s a function of imperfect knowledge by the writer; maybe (and this is the most common, I think) the world just works differently now. Does it really make sense to think that all words written two hundred, three hundred, a thousand years ago can apply to the world today? How much has the world changed in your lifetime, or in your grandparents’ lifetimes?

Words that were written long ago, even very important words–although this is painful for many people to accept–can lose some of their relevance. Sometimes they simply no longer apply because society and social norms and values have changed. Sometimes they have been misinterpreted and the results don’t make sense in a contemporary context. Sometimes they have been perfectly well interpreted–but the results still don’t make sense because the world to which they are being applied is not the same world in which they were written. When, in fact, the world to which they are being applied could not even have been imagined by the writer or writers.

As a culture, we value the power of the written word, sometimes further and more blindly than we should. We think we have “rights” because a long time ago, someone wrote it down and others living at the time agreed with it. We think we know how to live in the world because someone wrote a set of rules that made sense at the time and with the state of knowledge and understanding at that time. This is true for political documents, and religious documents, and historical documents.

We cannot take it as a given that all these written words are infallible or immutable–when we do, we run the risk of allowing their power to become twisted and terrible. We can’t simply point to words and say “See? This says X and so that’s the way things are.” We must ask if we can reasonably expect to apply these writings to a world which would not even be recognizable to those who wrote them. It’s quite possible that some parts will stand the test of time. But from time to time they must be questioned and re-evaluated to see if they still hold true and are still relevant. Sometimes we need to think about what it really is we are trying to defend. We may need to look deeper into words to identify their true meaning, spirit, or intent. Sometimes words are not black and white.

And if they don’t bear up under this close and demanding examination, then maybe it’s time to rewrite them, edit them, or acknowledge that they have outlived their usefulness. They are only words, and they have only as much power as we choose to give them. We can always write more, that will serve us better.