I suppose I could vaguely consider myself a writer. I write. People read what I write. I've even sold stories to publications and earned enough to super-size my McDonalds order with that pay. I have no illusions of writing full-time for a living. Or of even signing a book deal with a big publisher. I'm happy writing short stories about disturbing and sad and terrible things. It's not easy. If it were I doubt I would enjoy it.
I don't often ponder these things, though it does interest me. Writers interest me. It's not the glamorous lives they lead, locked for months on end behind closed doors tapping away at keys, gas station burrito and Oreo stains on their shirt their only constant companion. No social life until the never-ending deadlines are met. Spouses with the white jacket men on ready speed dial. No, for me it's more an interest in their processes. How they took an idea and made it blossom into a world.
Okay, enough with that. What even brought it up was a post by another writer, Paolo Bacigalupi, who if you haven't read you need to. Right now! Start with 'The Windup Girl'. Here's the wonderful thing he had to say that inspired me to say my own thing:
One thing stands out to me: I like writers. I like those people who
struggle to say something with fiction. Those people who struggle to
shape an idea, or a character or a
scene, struggle to get a voice and hold on to it through the whole of a
long project. I like those people who do not gaggle about with
theoretical abstractions of what a book should be, or could be, or might
be, but instead dare to face the thing that they actually can create,
and that will never come close to the platonic ideal of whatever some
outsider will say is good. I like the people who dare the messy
complexity of hundreds of thousands of words, tangled, all connected,
all influenced by one another, lace webworks, painstakingly and messily
constructed. Those webs of story might shake in the wind, and might come
apart when people prod them, might barely manage to cling to a shape,
but I love them for their bravery. -Paolo Bacigalupi
