Memoirs of a Sound Byte

I've been a writer for 15 years - first as an aspiring comic book scribe, then short story writer, then an essayist, then a poet, then an essayist again, then game developer, tech writer and PR hack - nearly 10 of which have professional, legitimate jobs where I was hired specifically for my ability to put words to the page. Every workday, I talk about and teach people about writing better, and every night, I go home and practice my own craft in my own publishing company. Writing is my calling, and I do it every single day. But to this day, I often hestitate to classify myself as a "writer," despite over 50 published articles, 25 e-books, 18 co-authored books and reams of documentation and reports to my credit.

But as any writer who's been working a while will tell you, people who have written something are far more liberal with calling themselves "writers" than those for whom writing is a vocation. Take for instance my buddy Art, who repeatedly took upon himself the mantle of Shakespeare, Carver, and Yeats by descibing himself as "a poet" when picking up on girls because he had taken a class at a community college. The interwebz in many ways have only exacerbated the issue with blogs giving even poor writers the chance to become "authors" or "journalists." Granted, there have been some absolutely brilliant authors that have found their voices and an audience (even I have benefitted) from the new democratization of media and explosion of Web 2.0, but the ratio who legitimately deserve to be called "writers" rather than "people who write X" is abyssmally low.

So when I read this, you'd forgive me if I got a little indignant.

Typing Without a Clue
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: December 6, 2008

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

Joe, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, was no good as a citizen, having failed to pay his full share of taxes, no good as a plumber, not being fully credentialed, and not even any good as a faux American icon. Who could forget poor John McCain at his most befuddled, calling out for his working-class surrogate on a day when Joe stiffed him.

With a résumé full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion.

Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Here’s Palin’s response, after Matt Lauer asked her when she knew the election was lost:

“I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.”

I have no idea what she said in that thicket of words.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.

Writing is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible, exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”

When I heard J.T.P. had a book, I thought of that Chris Farley skit from “Saturday Night Live.” He’s a motivational counselor, trying to keep some slacker youths from living in a van down by the river, just like him. One kid tells him he wants to write.

“La-di-frickin’-da!” Farley says. “We got ourselves a writer here!”

If Joe really wants to write, he should keep his day job and spend his evenings reading Rick Reilly’s sports columns, Peggy Noonan’s speeches, or Jess Walter’s fiction. He should open Dostoevsky or Norman Maclean — for osmosis, if nothing else. He should study Frank McCourt on teaching or Annie Dillard on writing.

The idea that someone who stumbled into a sound bite can be published, and charge $24.95 for said words, makes so many real writers think the world is unfair.

Our next president is a writer, which may do something to elevate standards in the book industry. The last time a true writer occupied the White House was a hundred years ago, with Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote 13 books before his 40th birthday.

Barack Obama’s first book, the memoir of a mixed-race man, is terrific. Outside of a few speeches, he will probably not write anything memorable until he’s out of office, but I look forward to that presidential memoir.

For the others — you friends of celebrities penning cookbooks, you train wrecks just out of rehab, you politicians with an agent but no talent — stop soaking up precious advance money.

I know: publishers say they print garbage so that real literature, which seldom makes any money, can find its way into print. True, to a point. But some of them print garbage so they can buy more garbage.

There was a time when I wanted to be like Sting, the singer, belting out, “Roxanne ...” I guess that’s why we have karaoke, for fantasy night. If only there was such a thing for failed plumbers, politicians or celebrities who think they can write.

Now, to be fair: one of the things that irritated the hell out of me as a writing major was english majors; the type of people who would insist that if you haven't read the "great books" of literature, which of course grow increasingly more obscure, then you don't have business to be talking about and/or writing it. Some people don't need to know what Hemingway would say about something to be able to say it themselves - some people have the experience, the depth of knowledge of a field, or just the deepness of character to write things that are valuable, useful, and/or meaningful to other human beings. It may not be "great literature" but in all seriousness, how much of what even the literary enthusiast reads is actually literature? Someone's got to write ads, newspaper articles, websites, training manuals, scripts, comedy routines, etc., etc. So the author's argument that Joe the Plumber has no right to write about his time on the national stage because he hasn't curled up with Alexis de Tocqueville rings hollow to me.

Ultimately, though, I like all writers resent things that diminish and trivialize our craft, and cynical cash grabs like a memoir for a guy who was a tool of a political campaign (who he now is trying to throw under the bus) kill a small piece of our collective bibliophilic soul. My mentor in college was an author whose agent also worked for John Grisham; the agent would work with Clint because Grisham's popular tripe kept him going and let him sell Clint's books to publishers as the "literary" part of his portfolio. This is the way of the business world. But as I watch the tremendous rise of memoirs and extended opionon essays in the market, some legitimately good (Dreams of My Father being one) but mostly drek (like this smegma from another browser tab right now), I worry about the value of the word in general. If any yahoo can get published, how will my legitimately good stuff (IMNSHO, of course) find its audience? How will it even make it through the distribution chain? I don't have a name that was thrown out 22 times in a presidential debate for no good reason - does that mean my life's work will never bear real fruit? These are the questions that haunt you.

But if you're a writer, you keep on doing what you're born to do. That's how you earn the right.