What Not To Say To Your Writer, a Guide for the Masses

I’ve seen a lot of complaints on twitter these days about some of the thoughtless things writers often hear from non-writers, things that we hear so often and that rub us so wrong that after, oh, about the 10th or 20th time we hear it, it becomes a quick route to instant annoyance. So, I decided to make a list of things as a sort of guide to non-writers out there who have writers amongst their loved ones, friends, or acquaintances, a sort of etiquette guide for dealing with the beleaguered creative in your midst.

“Do you make money off of that?”/”How much do you make from your writing?”/”Okay, but what’s your real job?”/Insert Financial Question Here/etc.

Writers who don’t win the Publishing Lottery (ie. Make it to Bestseller Status) all tend to live in varying levels of financial uncertainty.

It’s true that some months we may make a big sale on a short story or have enough freelance gigs to make it through, and that some months we may be stuck eating week old leftover fuzzy ramen that even the cats won’t touch. Some of us take the route of necessity and take a day job to make ends meet and look forward, desperately, to the days when we can make enough money off of our writing to write full time.

Believe it or not, most of us were actually aware of this going in, and we do it anyway. Why? Because we’re all a bit mad, or we can’t not do it, it’s our passion, it’s the thing that gives us that good down low tickle, it’s more fun than a barrel full of zombies, whatever. We’re not stupid, we know it’s hard as fuck to make money at this, and it doesn’t matter. Being poor won’t keep us from writing. The Words Must Flow.

When you ask these questions of a writer, you are essentially telling the writer “Unless you make x arbitrary amount of money from your writing, your career choice is invalid.” or “Why don’t you go get a real job?”

Have you published anything?/Have you published anything I might have read?

Again, especially with writers just starting out, this would feel as if you are invalidating their work. The implication with these questions is that an unpublished writer isn’t a real writer at all. There are, of course, some posthumous classics authors who would like to argue against that idea from somewhere in the netherworld.

An unpublished writer isn’t necessarily a bad writer and a published writer isn’t necessarily a good one. Getting published has as much to do with luck as skill, though having skill does raise your chances significantly. Gaining that skill, however, takes practice, so an unpublished writer? Well, they’re still practicing. Just because a writer isn’t published yet doesn’t mean they’re not a real writer.

Even for writers who are published, this may also be an awkward question. Much of my paid published work is GLBT and fetish erotica published under a pseudonym that I do not widely advertise and try to keep separate from my real name and non-erotica work. The majority of the time when I am asked this question, I am asked by someone who 1. I am not “out of the closet” as bisexual to; 2. Is an elderly relative who would be horrified that I even knew about such things; or 3. Is an acquaintance related to my “day job” where it would be inappropriate.  A lot of the non-erotica work I do under my real name would still potentially “out” me, too.  And I live in a place where you have to be very careful who you come out to.

Can I read what you’re writing?

Believe me, if the writer wants you to read or proofread his or her work you will know about it. Your writer will be begging you to read it several times a day, checking up on you to see if you’ve read it yet, and generally annoying the pants off of you to read his or her stuff.

If the writer hasn’t offered to let you read his or her work, don’t ask. Many writers are very protective of their first drafts. I, myself, never let anyone read much of anything until I’ve finished and read through something several times to proof, though I do keep a list of loyal and helpful beta readers for the later stages of getting something ready for publication. The objections raised in the last paragraph of the above section would also apply, because the writer may not want you to know the things the writer is writing about due to privacy issues.

Either way, wait until you are asked to read it, but please don’t do the asking.

Am I in your story?/Will you put me in your story?

Rest assured, if I know you at all, you will show up in my writing somewhere, sometime. You will likely be chopped up and torn apart and pieced back together with bits of other people gleaned from other places until you’re completely unrecognizable, a Frankenstein’s monster of a character, but you will be in there. I would expect that, for most writers, the same is true. But this does not necessarily mean that I want you to know it or that you will recognize yourself in the story or that it will be a flattering portrayal even if you do, for a character in a story is there to help tell the story and has a job to do, and it may not be a job you’ll like.

Writers are great collectors. We may take a pair of beautiful eyes from a stranger, an interesting scar from someone met in a checkout line, a characteristic manner of speaking from a coworker, a sweet personality from a friend or the vile personality of an annoyance at work and combine all of these disparate things into one character wherein the sources for the parts can no longer be known, even by the writer who combined them.

So yes, you are probably in my stories or the stories of your writer. No, your writer probably doesn’t know who or what you are there. If you think there’s a character exactly like you in the story, well, good. It’s good you found a character to identify with, but do not assume that the character is based on you or that what happens to the character is based upon how the writer feels about you.

“So you’re like Stephen King/J. K. Rowling/Insert Currently Famous Author who is clearly the only one the speaker could come up with Here”/”Do you think you’ll be rich and famous someday?”

Most of us don’t have delusions of grandeur, really. And most writers don’t write anything like whoever-the-current-number-one-author-is. What a writer aspires to do most is to write like himself. We work hard to develop our own style and our own voice and while we’d be incredibly flattered to be told our writing is as good as our favorite writers, our aim and goal in life is not to mimic or copy someone else’s writing. While a spot on the bestseller charts would be wonderful, most of us are smart enough to not expect it as our due. Most of us will never be so lucky. We just hope to be able to make a living off of what we love – and that living doesn’t have to be in the billions of dollars for us to be happy. Most of us aren’t looking for mansions on a hill. We’d be happy with a little cabin in the woods, honestly.

And if anyone ever asked me if I wrote like Stephanie Meyer, quite frankly, I would be incredibly insulted, no matter how much money lines her pockets.

Starting Any Kind Of Conversation While We’re Clearly Trying To Work

When a writer is in wordspace, you disturb him or her at your peril. When we get into the zone, when the words are coming easily and freely for once, the thing that will make us angriest is to have that flow interrupted. Often, even a simple hello can be like pushing the button that blocks the dam and can destroy an entire afternoon’s productivity. This, naturally, has a tendency to make us a wee little bit annoyed.

Good wine and chocolate might help. But better not to invoke the writer’s wrath to begin with – just leave us alone while we’re working unless the house is on fire or some other emergency is happening. Don’t be insulted if we ignore you while we’re working. The muse is skittish and will flutter away at the first excuse, so we learn to hold onto that bugger with both hands for as long as we can.

(Writers, if you have any to add to this list, leave it – and an explanation and translation for non-writers – in the comments.)

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