Filed under: Essay, Rant | Tags: grammar, linguistics, psycholinguistics, spelling, writing
I’ve never been fond of writers. That is to say, I’ve never been fond of people who call themselves writers. I don’t mind people who write; after all, communicating is a very natural thing to do, and if people enjoy writing then they should do it. But it does bother me when “people who write” transcend to that level of pretension required to be a “writer”.
Granted, for some people writing is their career. And if that’s the case, fine; you’re a writer. But I live in Seattle, a city filled with “writers” who can’t write but do it anyways. And even of those who do somehow turn hobby into career, the vast majority can’t write.
There is a discontinuity here, as there usually is with any kind of contentious statement. By “writing”, I am not referring to the ability to put pen to paper and make words come out. Nor am I referring to the practice of describing a series of emotions or ideas with the written word. I’m not even referring to the phenomenon by which people manage to produce something that a publisher wants to sell or a consumer to buy. I’m talking about a craft.
Some people would call writing art, not craft. We have a thing for writing-as-art; we call it “literature”. Literature is fine, I guess; like paintings or symphonies, we have a particular place in our culture for “art” of this type. But I personally have never bought much into it. In the “culinary arts”, there are two kinds of food; food that tastes good, and food that looks good. (Or, at least, looks difficult to prepare.) If you prepare a delicious steak, you’re not an artist. But if you make an inedible sculpture from food, then you are.
No, what we’re talking about here is writing as a craft. Like the culinarian and his ribeye, writing-as-craft is the art (if you will) of digging deep into words, and the ideas that they can express, and from individual lexemes constructing something that is both wonderful to consume and substantive enough that the craftsman can take pride in it. This isn’t writing for writing’s sake; this is writing for creation’s sake. To write is to practice one’s craft in order to make something that is better than nothing. And, like any craftsman, a writer needs tools.
