What Does A Writer Do?
You, too, are stuck aboard this adventure ride.
Brooklyn 2015
Don’t forget that right now you’re being pulled into a decent-sized rock while it’s hurtling through space at a speed which is pretty close to unbelievable. While you’re stuck aboard this adventure ride, there’s much to do, and there’s an endless amount of ways to spend your time, though presumably nobody has forced you to read these words, so you’ve decided to spend a few minutes of your time on this spinning rock reading these sentences, for which the writer offers a greeting: welcome.
What does a writer do? Here is one of those questions that offers a reflexive answer, but then reveals its complexity once you give it another beat. If we saw a nurse strolling down the street, we’d have an answer ready. What a nurse does is clear. And the same is true for a firefighter or plumber or teacher or designer or nearly any other profession that I can list. We might even notice a commonality to nearly every profession, one which, depending on the profession, we might find agreeable: whether you’re building or serving or selling, you’re mostly spending your professional time for someone else. The specifics of what an architect does most mornings, for instance, might be a tad hazy, but we get the basic idea, and there’s always someone else involved. Nurses and firefighters and plumbers are trapped just like everyone else in an uncontrollable spin on this mostly wet rock and, it seems, they spend most of their professional time doing something for the other prisoners. So what about writers? What exactly does a writer do?
As a descriptive term writer can serve many specialities: journalist, author, novelist, and, alas, even essayist. In most cases it’s obvious how the writer compares to the professions listed above. A journalist is (ideally) providing context or information or detail where it didn’t previously exist. Or an author is synthesizing years of research into a single book, offering readers knowledge they can’t gather themselves. But at this point we start coming dangerously close to a rather sharp line. Words like creativity and expression and identity start to appear. There’s nothing frightening or incorrect with those words, though they sometimes shove the writer in a precarious direction. Spending your time on this rock in a creative mode is a common desire, and one certainly mentioned by writers, yet I never really hear the necessary secondary question: creative in service of what? What’s underneath that desire for creativity?
If we try to slot the profession of writer into the professions above, that desire for creativity looks a little awkward. Without any context, there’s nothing wrong with the desire, but it is, again, how that desire is expressed. Is the writer purely focused on their own expression? Nothing beyond what drives them? Or are they using creativity in service of something else? Grabbing the loose thoughts inside your head—which are obviously fascinating to you—and tossing them onto a page without regard for what’s being given to readers, based on a desire for nothing but what’s frequently called personal expression, is well past the label of arrogant.
Readers are stuck spinning on this strange rock in a fairly prosaic part of the galaxy just like everyone else; if you take some of their time, perhaps you should offer sentences that resemble a warm meal with a cold drink and comfortable chair. Nothing is wrong with keeping a journal. Nothing is wrong with spending time lost in thought, pleased by your own creativity, struck by the wonder of how your mind flows. But if you’re offering your journal to the world, ensure that what lands on the page is truly for your reader.
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