3 stories on being a writer

I have difficulty thinking of myself as a writer, because I do not write for "fun", and writing is a painful, tooth-pulling experience. Earlier this year, I had decided to give it up. Here is what I wrote to myself on March 4:

I have decided to stop benig a writer, and to stop thinkin gof myself as a writer. I do not write. I do not like writing. Writing is difficult and obstreperous, and chiefly, I do not do it. I have many friends who are writers, and what they do is write. I do not.

So this leaves me with a hole in my perception. I don’t know what I am, or what I do or how to categorize myself now. I have an uncommon facility with English. That and a familiarity with layout sofware seem to be my marketable skill.

I don’t know who I will become now. Hopefully, somoene better, someone with fewer illusions.

I was basically ready to think of myself as a professional editor who dabbled in writing on the side. That still might be a sane idea for me.

Instead, about two weeks later, I signed myself on with a company called World Leaderz as Head Writer and Web Content Specialist. The backsliding didn’t even seem strange at the time, I just blundered in and started.

==

Since then, I have heard, unbidden, from four different people involved with the company, that I am an “excellent” writer. People use the word so uniformly, I wonder if they’re humoring me. I have no method to discern whether I am actually an excellent writer, or an accidental bullshitter.*

The difference is in confidence. Not the blustery unself-aware confidence that marketing employees use like motor oil to lube their ill-defined engines of commerce. I’ve tried that confidence, and a fairer-weathered friend I’ve never known. I’m talking about the confidence borne of experience and clear thinking.

As an editor, I have this latter confidence. I’m totally worth my money as an editor, and I can tell you why. Writing, however, is so much harder to do, requires more attention and grit, has fewer objective, measurable standards, and I’m such a weak-willed, lazy man. If I’m ever any good, I can’t tell you why. I’m an epistemic slot machine.

==

In junior high school, they occasionally took a bunch of the gifted kids into a room and talked to us about more interesting things than we had in class. (One wonders why we couldn’t maybe come up with an entire curriculum of the interesting stuff.)

One of these sessions involved an aptitude test. There were 14 or 15 areas of aptitude, things you might actually be sort of good at naturally. Above a certain score in each area indicated that you might be suited for this sort of thing as a career. The instructor told us that we should probably have three areas above the line.

I had one: verbal skills. I wasn't just good at it, I brushed the ceiling with it. Then about eight other areas were just below the line.

For all the crap aptitude tests get, this one was practically oracular about my future career. I’m not demonstrably good at anything, but somehow I’m great at telling you about everything I’m above-average at.

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I’m back on the job hunting trail again. If you are or know of anyone looking for an above-average generalist who can show his work, my email is in the right column.

*Yes, they might be the same thing on some level, but anyone attempting to smear some of that smarmy wisdom on me is really saying they’re not trying to understand my point.