Here’s some cheese with this whine

I’m not sure what was bugging David Joyner when he wrote this, but man, he’s got a wonderfully shiny happy take on the curious state known as writing:

More people are writing than ever before. Creative writing

courses continue to grow, publishing houses and literary agencies

are deluged by a single-sided, double-spaced tsunami. More people

than ever before dream of their lives being transformed by the

marks they make on paper, the buttons struck by their fingers,

indulging in fantasies of being transported straight from dim

suburban study to flashing red carpet.

In general, this hasn’t been regarded as a bad thing:

complementing national literacy programs, bolstering the country’s

cultural capital. But is writing really such a good thing to get

into? It might be thought that deciding to write is pretty

harmless: all you need to do is come up with an idea for a story,

and write it. No need for (very) fancy materials, all you need do

is secure the time and resources with which to fill the pages.

The experience turns out to be quite different. You spend only a

tiny percentage of your time engaged in writing actual prose

(putting aside completely the question of whether it’s any good or

not, which it generally isn’t). The rest of your time is spent

doing anything but writing prose, doing things like: staring into

space, staring at things, deciding or refusing to do things with

those things. But by far the greatest amount of time is spent

writing notes.

And all that talk of camaraderie? Why, it’s all balderdash:

The nation of budding writers will also have to get used to

something else. Hardly anything produced by the new hopefuls will

be published. To an outsider, this probably doesn’t sound like much

of a problem. Millions of people play some sort of sport on a

regular basis, unburdened by the delusion that, if they just stick

to it, they’ll surely be able to turn professional. So if they

can’t dispel the delusion, why don’t they just give up? Because

there’s only one thing worse than being a committed, though

unpublished, writer: someone who gave up writing because they could

no longer tolerate their failure to get anything published.

People talk of a “community” of writers. But no such community

exists, because writers are, by nature, an anxious and suspicious

bunch, especially when it comes to others engaged in the same

pursuit. The main thing that writers have in common is their desire

for spectacular and singular success, success that excludes all

(aspiring) others.

If you think it’s bad now, the future will only be worse. Not

just for the writers, but for the people around them as well. With

another few decades’ worth of rejection under your belt, chances

are you’ll end up one very bitter and messed up old geezer.

Retirement homes are set to become a lot more stressful. Rather

than settling down with your partner to enjoy a sly brandy and dry

in front of the plasmas and retirement-home-theatre systems left

behind by those materialistic baby-boomer forebears, you’ll be the

one giving cranky a new name, grimly shuffling off to your squalid

room to flog that long-suffering keyboard.

It sounds like Joyner either didn’t have enough or had way too much to drink before he wrote this.