6 Occupational Hazards of Being a Writer
If you’re going to become a writer, I feel I should warn you about all the occupational hazards that come with such a pursuit. Some of them will seem ludicrous. Others will make you scratch your head, and a few will make you question the sanity of every person you know who is a writer. In no particular order of importance, here are the occupational hazards of being a writer.
1. Everyone and Everything in Your Life is at Risk of Being Turned into Material
At a certain point, writing becomes the lens through which you view the world. For good things, this is wonderful. For bad things, not so much
If you’re a fiction writer you give yourself permission to turn a person who screwed you over into a character who gets dysentery and is filled with traits your reader will despise. And for some morbid reason you can’t help but laugh. As Anne Lamott once said “if you don’t like how you were portrayed in a book, you shouldn’t have screwed over a writer.
Then there are memoirs. I’m not sure my agent will go for my idea for a memoir about the insanity that is my extended Indian family. There’s certainly enough material there for a War and Peace length story that could eventually be adapted into a Bollywood film. There would be more crying than singing and more yelling than dancing, and eventually my entire extended family would disown me….tempting.
2. Generalized Advice Disguised as a Message for A Person Driving You Nuts
Another occupational hazard of being a writer is that you disguise things that annoy the hell out of you as generalized advice for your readers, when they really are an attempt to tell the people or one person who is annoying you about the thing that drives you nuts. And that’s how I came up with the title “the oh shit bar” for what might end up in my next book.
When I was in high school one of our long time family friends was learning to drive with her mother in the passenger seat. Her mother would hang on to the handle `above the car door as if it was going to protect and prevent her from all the other cars on the road. So our friend nicknamed the handle “the oh shit bar”.
Here’s the interesting thing about the oh shit bar. It does absolutely nothing for your safety. The notion that hanging on to it will protect you is a delusion. If anything grabbing on to it will worsen your anxiety and that of the people in the car with you. It’s even possible that grabbing the oh shit bar increases the likelihood of the driver getting into an accident.
I hope this family friend passes this message on to her mother. And you to yours. I of course would never dare pass into my own because she’d finally let go of the bar to slap me in the face. So I decided I’d put it in this post for the entire world to read, and keep my fingers crossed that my mother doesn’t ever visit medium.
3. You Overthink Your Life
My therapist once suggested that I write down thoughts to get them out of my head. For a normal person I’m sure this would be much more useful. If you’re a writer you’ll analyze how the words sound, try to find some Freudian meaning in the sentences and drive yourself insane in the process.
4. Comparison
You will at some point find yourself in the business of comparing your outsides to someone else’s insides.
Someone is always up to something more epic than you are, has a more poetic voice, or has more beautiful handwriting. This is not a profitable business, but for some reason we can’t resist this. I don’t know what the solution for this is yet. If you have figured it out, please tell me.
5. Losing a Moleskine is Worse Than Losing Your Wallet
I almost lost a moleskine once and I nearly lost my mind as a result. Losing my wallet wouldn’t be as big a deal. I could replace everything in the wallet. But to writers our notebooks are filled with our moments of genius, half baked ideas, and chicken scratch that are probably worthless to someone who found it. The reaction we have to a lost notebook would make a non-writer think we have severe emotional problems. If you ever find one of my notebooks, please return it.
6. Tendencies
If you write for long enough, you’ll develop certain tendencies. You’ll find yourself repeatedly using phrases. These things become completely obvious when you’re writing a book and you get an editorial memo that says
- “Maybe not another white guy as an example”
- “You mentioned this dude 7 times in the book.”
And this is why we have editors because they can see what we can’t. So if you have aspirations of becoming a writer, you’ve been warned of just a few of the many occupation hazards that come with the profession.
I’m the host of The Unmistakable Creative, and currently writing 2 books with Penguin Portfolio. I’ll try not to use you as material in my next book but I can’t promise anything.
