‘Your Metaphors Are Like a Struggle Plate’
In other words, I need to write more
One recent evening while we were making lunch for our daughter, cleaning the kitchen and just all-around catching up as working couples tend to do after the kid’s asleep, my wife and I got into a conversation about Donald Trump.
Nothing political, but rather how maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to be married to “the Donald” because you know you’re not going to have to worry about money. In other words, your paper will be pretty tight.
We’re riffing back and forth a little, commenting on what one could do with those oh-so-fat pockets, and then I dropped this nugget:
“You’d be so rich, you could buy water from the desert — where there’s hardly any water — and use it to bathe in.”
I gave a half-hearted laugh at my own lame joke, but my wife wasn’t going for it and stopped dead in her tracks. Earlier in the evening, I tried a joke that was less than memorable and we just moved past it. No such luck this time. She asked me if something was wrong and then delivered the following headline-worthy line:
“Your metaphors are like a struggle plate.”
Now that was funny, with a bit of a slap in the face mixed in. A struggle plate…wow. You think something you’ve done is good, so you put it out for the public, when in reality, 99 percent of the population knows what’s what. I — like I’m sure is the case for most people — had only heard that applied to those food photos that are a mix of disaster and humor in one package.
But the missus nailed it: I’d been serving up more than my fair share of struggle plates lately. And I think I know why.
I just haven’t been writing enough. That’s why I’m not as sharp with the witticisms. My wordplay synapses are misfiring.
Who really gets to write as much as they’d like, though? It’s hard to carve out the time, unless it’s your day job or something.
But here’s the clincher/catch/what have you: Writing is actually my day job.
Yep, forty hours a week, 49 weeks a year, that’s what I’m paid to do: write. I work for a major company providing the content for all types of marketing assets — from emails to mailers to websites and more.
I’m not doing much of the writing lately, though, that I’d really gotten into over the past few years, ever since I made the transition from copy editing full-on.
I should note that was a forced transition as I got caught in the whole economy-crashing thing, the sensation that unfortunately swept the nation, in the late aughts. While filling the stay-at-home dad role and wondering what to do next, I found myself contributing to a neighborhood blog and things kind of took off from there.
I literally got to do things I once only dreamed of, like writing for publications and websites I’d grown up reading. And no subject was off-limits: from interior decorating tips to the Grand Slams in pro tennis to rebuilding libraries in Haiti.
While all that was fine and fulfilling, I was also doing it on a freelance basis, which came with a high level of stress attached. A good chunk of my time was spent just looking for work and while I did score some plum assignments, the economic model was way off.
So I ended up getting into copywriting on a full-time basis. The impact of that has been mostly on my wallet: No longer do I have to ask my wife for comic book or haircut money.
But there is something missing. I look at stories on my Twitter line and in the magazines I subscribe to, and think, “Man, I wish that was my byline on that piece.” I try to do some of that writing on the side, but it’s hard. Reporting during the day is a near-impossibility and doing the necessary research on who/where to pitch a story idea is equally tough.
However, if I don’t want to get called out by my wife in our evening confabs, I need to step up my game. Finding balance is obviously essential to this. Having fun with what I’m doing is important, too. I have all types of platforms I can write from — I have blogs for days — and I need to make use of them.
I’ll get back to a level of sharpness soon, says my inner cheerleader. In fact, how about this?:
“If you were married to Trump, you’d be able to make your own desert oasis — and bathe anywhere you want!”
(Crickets.)
Well, maybe I’ll have to do a little more work to shed the “struggle plate” label.
