And Your Little Pink Dog, Too!

Folks view writers in certain ways. Besides the types I’ve written about in the past, the ones who consider writers nonworking or just monkeys pounding keyboards, there’s another group who view authors in a more romanticized manner. They see writers as celebrities, like Stephen King, Dean Koontz or Stephanie Meyer, all of whom have made a lot of money and garnered a lot of fame and influence from their literary endeavors.

The majority writers come nowhere close to that. Most struggle to make ends meet, and sweat over every word that hits the screen. The romantic view of the writer sitting in his smoking jacket, drinking a brandy whilst dictating silver prose to a buxom secretary is about as far removed from reality as a Lindsey Lohan’s attempts at telling the truth or Jessica Simpson actually saying something erudite.

Writers generally work long hours, sleep little and worry a lot. A hell of a lot. They suffer from an unusually high rate of depression and anxiety syndrome, and even manic-depression. Poe and Hemingway are two good examples. The old adage “suffering for your art”? Well, far too often that applies. And there’s a tendency to grow bitter, or socially retarded (or perhaps many of us are so introverted we start out that way and it’s a natural progression).

We don’t sit in mansions, either. And few of us drive a Lexus.

And pay? Novelists have no union or scale payments the way actors do. We never get paid 180 million bucks the way some sports figure do. And don’t even asking about the boob-flashing groupies, though there was this one librarian once…

Er, but moving on…

Most authors simply come nowhere close to the celebrity perception with which some folks view them. Writing is tough work. Emotionally draining work.

But what writers do have? An unquenchable passion for telling stories and seeing words assemble like an immense jigsaw into a glorious prose picture. A driving NEED to write, to entertain, to touch others’ live in some way. To have our souls heard.

We might not tote around little pink dogs, but we do carry around an abiding thirst for examining life and a burning desire to pass our observations onto others. No mansions, no fancy cars, no busty secretaries who can’t type…but lots of heart, and lots of desire to make the world a better place through words.

So, now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a groupie to attend to. Miss Jane is at my door and she’s looking unusually ravishing today…