March 27, 2009
Okay, let’s face it: there is a very stereotypical view of what a writer looks like floating around out there in Hollywood. On one hand it is nice to see the writing world authenticated as a real profession, but why does it have to be romanticized and appear so glamorous everywhere I look. On Sex In The City, Carrie eats Chinese with chopsticks while rattling off her thoughts cross legged before her keyboard, completely unhampered by a sexy phone call or the honking taxi’s outside her window. Hell, she might even stop mid-article to put on a super-glam outfit and meet the girls for brunch. I mean, wow, that looks great! It makes me want to be a writer! And then in Something’s Gotta Give, Diane Keaton dresses angelically in pure white and writes her plays in a crisp, clean room in the Hamptons, taking long walks on the beach and heated rolls in the hay. Now that looks great too…I want to be a writer like that.
But in truth, I have yet to meet a writer that lives or works quite like that. The ones I have met are holed up in dark rooms wearing yesterday’s faded sweatpants and a fun-bun hair-do surrounded by stale pretzels and several half empty coffee mugs. And have I mentioned that they write amid the piles of clutter that never fails to gather as their work begins to pick up steam. Sleep? Never. Long walks? A thing of the past. The only thing that exists is the work.
I, for one, write when I can – in the parking lot at school, on a bench at the playground, on the beach (my most productive!) – I steal every spare moment. It seems that my characters stubbornly move along at their own pace and rarely wait for a convenient moment for me…the mere documentarian of their lives.
So I watch these writers on TV and in the movies and wonder why everyone hasn’t tried to become a writer. Or have they? Is that why it is almost impossible to get published?