Why Do Writers Write About the Writing Life So Badly?
I have long felt that writers in every medium are overly prone to writing about writers, and that this is mainly a reflection of self-involvement and laziness and incuriosity and ignorance on the part of those who are in a position to make a living as writers about what other people do and how they live. I will add, too, that this attitude does not seem to me to be unrelated to how unbelievably closed the worlds of publishing, film and television production, etc. have become to people who are not personally connected with the business — the children and grandchildren of people in that field.
That being the case it does not seem too unsurprising that they seem to have not the slightest clue about what, for example, architects or lawyers or college professors do. But it is more surprising that they write so badly about their own profession — endlessly trafficking in the same stale clichès, not least the notion that writers spend most of their time sitting in some large, handsome bookstore signing copies of their latest for a line of starstruck fools winding out the shop door and down the block as they receive their gushing praises with a condescending smile on their self-satisfied faces.
Still, if surprising it is not inexplicable. Even if as writers they have some actual experience of what it is to be a writer, they don’t write from that experience any more than they do when they write about those other jobs. Rather than life they write from what they have seen in movies and TV. (Pompous middlebrow critics will call this postmodernism. I call it creative bankruptcy.) Thus even if their canned biographies tell us that they went to college, and maybe even finished a whole semester (you’d be surprised how many college dropouts, nay, high school dropouts, are on the Hollywood A-list), their frame of reference seems to consist wholly of a half-remembered long-ago viewing of the bits of Professor Kingsfield being arrogant and abusive in The Paper Chase. And when they write about writers they write from bad movies and TV shows about writers, in which writers are sitting in those bookstores signing copies of their latest for starstruck fools — to the bewilderment and annoyance of the millions whose experiences of a writing career have been far more Kilgore Trout (who in spite of his vast output, “did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way”) than J.K. Rowling.
Originally published at https://raritania.blogspot.com.
