Being a Writer

So here’s a question that I thought about a little while ago and that has been bouncing around in my brain ever since: Why do so many people want to BECOME or BE writers? This is a different question than “why do you write?” Not many people actually LIKE writing that much, yet they harbor a secret dream of being a writer. I am not condemning them, but I am wondering in all seriousness, what IS IT that people are dreaming about and why?

Here’s my end of the story so you don’t think I am asking the question from a place of snootiness: I have always written and since I was a little kid have always dreamed of being an author of some sort, meaning having a book published and out in the world. There was a three year period where I did not write anything but volumes and volumes of messy, whiney, DRAMATIC journals. I still DREAMED of being a writer of more than just journals, and I filled page after page FANTASIZING about the GREAT WRITER LIFE that I so YEARNED FOR. Finally, it dawned on me that what I really wanted was to be a writer…IN A MOVIE. Yep, you read that right.

One of my favorite movies is An Angel at My Table, a film about the New Zealand author Janet Frame. Through poverty, debilitating shyness, wrongful institutionalization in a mental hospital, deaths of two of her sisters, and a near miss at getting a lobotomy, Frame emerged to write novels, short stories, and poems to high acclaim. I LOVED watching her type! I loved the focus and the passion and her green sweater set. I loved watching her get that first letter accepting her novel Owls Do Cry in the mail. Gee, yes, there were the heinous 8 years in an insane asylum, yadda yadda yadda, but she saw the world with SUCH WONDER and she WROTE IT DOWN!

I could say the same thing about the movie Capote, or the Diane Weist character in Hannah and Her Sisters or half a dozen other movies. Being a writer LOOKED SO GOOD!

So, what a bummer—a total bummer—it was to discover just how BORING writing can be. I was so HIGH on the movie reality of Being a Writer that it was so very hard to accept the reality, which yes, is sometimes beautifully fulfilling (hell yes!), but so often humanly boring, depressing, discouraging, crazy making, not to mention potentially damaging to any social life you might have. Plus, most of the time, NOBODY GIVES A SHIT. Nobody watches you at your desk toiling away thinking, “look how PASSIONATE she looks! Look at how WONDERFUL it is being her! A WRITER! WOW!”

DANG!

But WHAT IS THAT? Here I had that desire—to BE a WRITER, without the actual writing part and why? Why didn’t I watch movies about say, MECHANICS or CHEFS and have the same swooning yearning?

I know so many people who want to be writers, but have very little inclination to actually WRITE. They are from all backgrounds, and some of them are readers and some of them, curiously, are not. What is it about the story or the image of the writer that we pine for? What did I pine for? I pined for meaning, which is what I have always pined for. In the movie, it always looked so easy, because a finished life with a beginning, middle, end, music, and credits IS easy. It’s already been worked out for us. Life, in comparison, is chaotic. How do you find meaning or anything else EASILY in that?

It’s just a question I think about and wonder—what makes us yearn for that one title of being a writer? What does it mean to you to BE A WRITER? And why?