AKA, No This Post Isn’t About Penises.
Soooo, it’s probably not going to be much of a surprise to
anyone here that I’m kind of the sort of guy who sees himself being a writer
one day. If it is, hello! Welcome to the blog: get comfy, make yourself at
home, and if a figure feasting on flesh and sin confronts you from the corner
of your eye, just make the Sign of Three and he’ll leave. Don’t mind him, he’s
just a big old softy at heart.
Now, the interesting thing about writing is that from what I
understand it’s a quite a bit like playing the guitar: everyone kind of has
this idea floating around their head that they could do it if they wanted to, and a not-insignificant amount of
people will even take that vague inkling of supposed skill far enough to give
it a shot. But, at the end of the day, there are far more guitars gathering
dust in a cupboard then there are guitarists.
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| They're both also way less useful for picking up chicks than you might think. |
"Yeah, so?" I hear you thinking, having yet to abandon this joke. "And?" Well, firstly, "and" isn't really a question. If it was, the answer would be rather simple: something happened the other day that
left me kinda annoyed. Long story short, I met a jerk on the internet and
decided to spend 900 words telling him to go get stuffed.
Short story long (it’s an expression, shut up): a few days
ago I got an email from a fellow blogger. He (or she, though I suspect it’s a guy)
had come across my blog and thought that it was pretty neato indeed, apparently.
This isn’t what annoyed me, obviously: in fact, at the time it made my day. It
didn’t even annoy me when he asked me to look at his blog and, in his own
words, “give some tips to a fellow writer” (he actually said wordsmith, a phrase so douchey I refuse to acknowledge it) because for someone like me, having
a fellow wannabe ask for some help is a massive
vote of confidence.
Now, maybe I’m naïve. Maybe I got what was coming to me. But
when someone asks me to give them some tips, I’m going to take a look at what
they’ve done, have a good long think, and then give them some goddamn tips. And
with
nine tenths of everything being crap, those tips aren’t necessarily going
to be pleasant. And yes, it sucks: I’d know. I spent a year writing my (terrible)
first book – a full year, writing six hours a day, seven days a week. When it
was completed, I sent it out to my closest friends and family, and the response
was so overwhelmingly negative and apathetic that I didn’t write a word for
three years. But the criticism I received allowed me to become much better.
The trick is to take things in the spirit they're given: accept
that you’re not perfect and try to improve. Pull out the guitar and practice.
Unfortunately, this guy didn’t seem to get the memo. I tried to be gentle, but
the response I got was foul-mouthed and hateful, deriding me for “not understanding”
his style, for “failing to get” his humour and his references. It was an email
as petty as it was misspelled.
“So what?” I hear you
think. “You met a jerk on the internet: big whoop. Wanna go home and get your
big-boy pants on?”
First off, this is the internet: nobody wears pants here.
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| Behold! |
Secondly, this probably wouldn’t have bugged me so much if
it was the first time it’d happened.
But it isn’t.
Every so often, you meet someone who wants to be a writer,
except not really. They’re the people who leave their guitar in their lounge room
hoping you’ll ask them about it; the ones who can’t really play, but chalk up
every missed note or unpleasant twang to a bad string or needing to warm up.
And it’s not just writing: these guys are everywhere. They’re the “artists”
with half-finished, thoroughly-shoddy paintings prominently displayed on easels
throughout the house: the wannabe poet who just happened to be reciting one of his newest verses as you came by: for the more academically inclined, the guy who constantly spews laughably-outdated
pop-science into every conversation he has without really understanding any of
it.
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| Also known as the Dan Brown method of conversation. |
In other words, they’re the kind of people who don’t really
want to play the guitar – they just
want to be guitarists, ‘cause guitarists got mad swag yo. Which, whatever, fine,
go nuts. But if you happen to come across someone who actually gives two fucks
about what you’re pretending to, do us all a favour and shut up. You won’t die
from being quiet for two seconds, I promise.
And though I sincerely doubt he’s still reading this, Random
Internet Guy take my advice. If you actually do want to do any kind of writing,
get over yourself. You are not the new Oscar Wilde, blithely snapping off
satirical quips to the slack-jawed massed: you posted three times about your dinner for god’s sake. Even someone as
amateur as me knows that this industry is brutal. Rejection is par for the
course, and if you can’t hack it, you don’t belong here.
And if you don’t
particularly care about writing – if, in fact, you’re just in it for the “prestige”
of making bad jokes on the internet, or to be someone’s “cool writer friend”
(and I promise you, neither of these are things), then kindly piss off: the
internet is full enough without the likes of you clogging it up.
