By K. A. Laity
Everybody's a writer or wants to be. At least that's what the internet tells me. There are all kinds of ways to help writers or writer wannabes.
For example there is the persistent Twitter spam telling you that writers are needed very badly. There are ways to get paid for this, our urgent friend tells us. As Victoria Strauss writes at the Writer Beware® blog, the link included in that spam tweet leads to a service where you can pay to be told about jobs that will pay you for writing. Gosh!
Never mind that there are plenty of free sites offering the same thing: RealWritingJobs wants to help you out of the goodness of their hearts to find real writing jobs for about $50 a month. What a bargain! If that's not good enough for you, because you're an artist who's already written a magnum opus, why not pay PublishAmerica to enter one of Amazon's fine publishing contests? Wait—what's that? You can enter for free on your own? But what about the fine imprimatur that PublishAmerica gives you? You don't want to do without that, do you? And wait—that script writing contest for Amazon's new crowd-sourced film empire: did you know that they get to hold onto your script's rights for a year and a half even if you don't win anything?
Why are people so desperate to become writers? Real writers know that it's difficult and seemingly endless work that is poorly remunerated at best for 99% of the people who do it. Unlike the popular portrayals of writers in films and television, it's distinctly unglamorous work that necessitates sitting on your ass for a big part of your day and typing or writing for hours on end, looting every corner of our brain for ideas and flogging life into them if they fail to breathe.
Nonetheless, every other person across the globe seems to think it is the avenue to easy riches. I suspect it's because almost everyone must learn the basic skill of writing. Unlike music or painting, one can get by with little more than those basic skills in many facets of life. I know from personal experience that it is possible to enter college without any comprehension of how language actually works or what a metaphor is.
You won't get far in the music world lacking those same basic skills (pace Sid Vicious). But if you're able to write emails and sign the occasional greeting card, you can be a writer. There's a wonderful Xtranormal video made by David Kazzie that every writer I know has shared. It pretty much sums up this strange phenomenon.
Image via Kruemi's Flickr