The Cool Writer Girl
Cool Writer Girls are not regular writers, they only live in romantic comedies, even if that romantic comedy thinks it’s not like other romantic comedies. Cool Writer Girls write things effortlessly. Cool Writer Girls work at splashy magazines, with names like S’nuff, Poise, Lips, Spats, Composure. The magazine always has to be famous, and she gets to hang out with famous people, because women’s careers don’t matter or are not respected unless it has some sort of celebrity factor.
She is always an independent lady, living her best life. She always has an apartment in New York with built-ins and a great view. It’s usually neat except for the lacy negligee that was hastily tossed on the floor the prior evening. The apartment is in Manhattan, never in another borough.
A Cool Writer Girl writes for the only magazine still thriving in print. She doesn’t have a degree in journalism or years of putting in her time. She doesn’t have an MFA. She hasn’t done The Artist’s Way. She doesn’t have the shameful experience of resorting to writing for a content mill. She lands at the magazine because she is who she is, she’s fabulous, she’s funny, she’s got IT and that’s all that matters. What she thinks, everyone of her gender thinks. Just by the nature of calling her a writer, you know that Cool Writer Girl matters.
Although she has decided to make her career of being a writer, is fine with writing degrading stories about boobs and bitches and belches and Botox. She does this with little effort or shame. In fact, we never see her actually writing these pieces, just mentioning them.
She has a best friend at the magazine, someone who probably started out as a frenemy but then their relationship grew to friendship because cool writer girls need a sidekick. The Friend is always not quite as pretty, not quite as funny, and not quite as witty. Watch out for said friend, because at the end of the day she’s competition for whatever senior writer/editor position is on the table where the boss chooses who to hire after which Cool Writer Girl can be more vicious.
The Cool Writer Girl’s boss is a former CWG, but is no longer nice because as a woman she had to give up her soul and ability to treat people respectfully because magazine writing is a cut throat business. The boss is ambitious but has no idea what she is ambitious for yet thinks that she has to get CWG to aspire to be her. The boss always looks immaculate and always bursts in a conference to give someone an insult, but especially to give someone THE ASSIGNMENT. The one she’s afraid of, the one that will make her talk to the guy she thinks she hates, but secretly longs for him, to save her from her own self.
THE ASSIGNMENT has no deadline. In fact, Cool Writer Girl will give up on THE ASSIGNMENT if it affects her personal life too much with no consequences. But she’ll always be triumphant when it does publish, several months later when the topic is magically more relevant.
Cool Writer Girl is also a party girl, someone who is magically able to spend her nights drinking and dancing and fucking and not writing drafts of said project, sending it to the editor for review several times. Unlike regular writers, she doesn’t agonize over her word choice or have crippling self-doubt or doesn’t decide to start all over after spending five hours on a draft.
Lastly, Cool Writer Girl is always hot. She’s always conventionally thin, and has somehow avoided the binge/stress eating that regular writers have when hunched over a laptop. She doesn’t need to order takeout as a reward for writing a few paragraphs that don’t suck. In fact, sometimes she doesn’t even need a laptop, just a notebook to jot down three words during a pitch meeting.
Cool Writer Girl never talks about writing or what she likes to read or her “process.” The words just burst out of her perfectly waxed vagina onto a page and impresses everyone other magazine, and showing that somehow Cool Writer Girl maybe does have some sort of soul after all. She either gets a promotion or quits triumphantly.
It doesn’t matter if she’s fired, because Vanity Fair will always be willing to publish a Cool Writer Girl. Cool Writer Girl can have it all.
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