Real Words

 I often dread that cocktail party introduction question. I haven’t come up with an answer yet that satisfies me. If I tell people that I’m an author, they immediately start to tell me about the books that they’ve got half-written in the bottom of their desk drawer. If I tell them that I own a writing business, they always hand me the phone number of a cousin who is looking for writing work. If I just say that I’m a writer, they want to know what I write.

What do I write? That in itself is a complicated question. I often evade the question by saying that I’ll write whatever they pay me to write. Which isn’t true but it’s an easy answer that holds enough truth to make it a reasonable response. Or I’ll talk about the odd jobs - the horoscopes I’ve written, the adult movies I’ve reviewed, the kinds of things that people want to hear about at parties. The truth of what I write is that sometimes it’s really boring stuff. It’s web content about real estate investing that’s written for the beginner and boiled down to the basics. It’s blog content for a site that describes the neighborhoods of the city I live in. It’s not bad work or work I mind doing, but I’m something of a research fan so it’s probably more interesting to me than to the average person.

But the problem isn’t even really that I can’t say what I do. It’s that most of the time, I don’t really want to talk about my work. Writing as a way of life is something that is complicated. You can’t explain to someone who isn’t a writer about the days that you get up and you sit at the computer and you force your fingers to create words but every single sentence is painstakingly slow. You can’t describe how frustrated you are because your clients won’t pay you and you aren’t quite sure what to do about and you’re too busy hunting down new work to pay the bills to really push them for the money. And you can’t describe why this work is so incredibly satisfying that you don’t mind these days much at all really.

What I do is write. What I don’t need to do is talk about writing.