A writer by any other name

John Crace over at Guardian Unlimited discusses a YouGov poll which states that – more than anything, including becoming that well-known oxymoron, a sports personality – people these days aspire to be an author. (Of course many sports personalities have autobiographies in the shops, but few actually bother to write them.) No doubt it's the glamour, the money, the influence and the debauched launch parties that attract people to the writing life. Not the long hours of scribbling with a pen or bashing the keys of a computer in the hope that your perspiration is recognised as inspiration. Crace suggests it is all about wanting to be creative. This leads to a debate on the comments section below his post on exactly when you should call yourself a writer.

Some claim you cannot do so until you've been published. Others state that selling your manuscript, getting an agent or even just the act of writing in your spare time are sufficient achievements to label yourself as a writer. Or should you only be able to call yourself a writer if you live off your writing? That would preclude almost all but a very few authors in Britain from calling themselves anything other than bankrupt. But who wants to be a failed writer?

Certainly, I write for a living – but as a copywriter. I'm banished to the outside of books, the inside is strictly off limits. Yet, I would never call myself a writer. Journalists write too, and none I've met would describe themselves as writers unless they had a book out. In the art world, would you call yourself a painter if you'd never sold a painting? Or would you simply say you paint? Two different statements, clearly. If you play the piano in your spare time are you a pianist? There's certainly a feeling that the word writer has an exclusivity and for some it should be ring-fenced to keep away those who've yet to get their words inside hard or soft covers. As for blogging, how many bloggers call themselves writers? You can blog to your heart's content and have no readers or a million readers: but are you a writer or are you not?

Calling yourself a writer is really making a statement. It is saying: this is not what I do, but what I am. Yet, those who claim to be writers but who are not recognised for their writing remind me a little of Captain Hardcastle in Roald Dahl's Boy. Captain Hardcastle was the sadistic teacher Dahl most feared at his boarding school. The Captain had fought in the Great War but upon his discharge had insisted that everyone still call him by his military ranking. In civilian life the rank meant nothing – especially, as Dahl notes, the rank of 'Captain', which 'was the bottoms' – except to perhaps indicate a certain feeling of inadequacy with regard to the present circumstances in which Captain Hardcastle found himself. Like most of us, he felt the need to boast about something and teaching young boys, who he clearly hated, wasn't it.

Is it any wonder that so many who call themselves writers are not the happiest, most outgoing of people? (Oxymorons notwithstanding.) What an odd thing for people to aspire to be.

Colin Brush, Senior Copywriter

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Comments

[Imani]

What I find irritating about that poll is that everyone wants to be a writer but not a reader for some strange, strange reason.

[Rob]

I think we can probably assume that, as it's in the books section of a reasonably literarily inclined broadhseet newspapers, and are contributing to a ebate on writing, that they read the odd sentence.

I'm also a copywriter, and I'd never have the cojones to call myself a writer. If anyone asks, I say I work in advertising. Then I usually apologise.

[Stephen Tiano]

I forget who it was—some writer who perhaps also taught—who said that he had more of a belief that the person who said, "I want to write," actually would, more likely than that the person who said "I want to be a writer" would. Influenced by that—but apparently not so much that I can remember who said it—I think it better to say what we do, rather than what we consider ourselves or how we want to be characterized.

[Peter Burton]

I would be forever in your debt if this could be brought to the attention of the movers and shakers there. There are two hundred poems.

The Poem 'Belsen' has been turned into a short story and i have completed short stories on my Childhood in Airdrie and a dystopian piece , neither of which are at the blogsite.

Particularly recommended : 'After the Flood' about New Orleans, 'Iraq', 'Belsen' ,
'Charge of the Blue locusts' about Orgreave and 'The Man in the Iron Mask' about Sheridan.

Writers Groups in Glasgow have been encouraging me to try and get my material
published.

Pete