While you are able to enjoy happy and long-lasting relationships with people who have no interest in writing, there are a few aspects involved with your lifestyle that a third party, however beloved, may have trouble wrapping their head around.
1. Why You Can’t Go Out Tonight
It is Friday night and your friend wants to go to dinner or catch a movie. However, you have been mentally mapping out your story in your head while at work and you’re itching to get started on that project, or continue where you left off.
“Why are you being so anti social?” your friend may ask. “It’s not healthy to be cooped up in your room all night when you could be out with your friends.”
You love your friend. You love spending time with your friend. But the writer’s life requires you to make sacrifices. You may want to kick back and just relax, nevertheless, the more you put off writing, the harder it is to get back into the rhythm.
This doesn’t mean you never want to have fun with your friend, it just means sometimes you have to say no if you ever want to get anything done.
2. Why You Overanalyze Everything
“Why can’t you just turn off your brain and enjoy the movie/TV show/book? Who cares if the villain’s motivation doesn’t make sense, or the romance came out of nowhere? Movies/TV shows/books are suppose to be fun. You’re thinking too much.”
What your friend doesn’t realize is a writer’s mind doesn’t just “turn off.” Asking a writer to stop considering integral story elements is like asking a colorblind person to just see green. You obtain new stories ideas through all your senses, and you study all the different forms of storytelling in the hopes of developing your own style.
You know from experience how hard a creator must toil in order for a story to be told well, so when a writer tries to get away with doing the bare minimum it is frustrating.
3. Most Writers Aren’t Rich
With superstar authors like J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and George R. R. Martin raking in the big bucks, your friend would be forgiven for assuming that most successful writers are makin’ dat money. However, you know that even writers who have published many articles and books are usually lucky to make a living wage, let alone get rich. Writing is not a job you should take if you are hoping to afford a condo in Miami. It’s something you should do because you feel like you’d go crazy if you didn’t.
Making a lot of coin would be nice, and money is a necessary evil for survival. However, if you are truly serious about being a writer, it’s not your aim to get rich.
4. Nothing Is Sacred
Your friend knows you’re a writer, right? So of course they realize if they tell you about the time their uncle paraded around naked in his trailer park with a loaded shotgun singing “I’m A Yankee Doodle Dandy,” it’s going in a story someday, correct? Sadly no. Your friend will not understand. In fact, they will likely be very upset. Writers are like pack rats, continuously searching for interesting nuggets of information to place in their stories to help give them flavor. Truth is usually stranger than fiction, so true-life events are typically the most inspiring. You aren’t sharing your friends intimate moments in an attempt to shame them, you’re doing it to bring your story to life. You can explain this to your friend all day, but it’s unlikely they will see it your way.
5. Your Internet History
Writers need to know most things. Not for their own sake, but for their characters’. If their protagonist is a sociopath with a proficiency in murder, an author must familiarize themselves with common methods used to end a person’s life. They must know the best way to dispose of a body, how long it takes to drown someone, or the various stages a corpse goes through during decomposition. If you’re fantasy writer, it’s prudent to know about various weapons and poisons or herbs that would be used in an age with no technology. A thriller writer may need to research some of the key components of a bomb. A fellow writer would understand. You’re friend (and possibly Homeland Security), however…well…don’t give them your password.
6. Writer’s Block
Writer’s block is a reality most creatives face. Some symptoms include self-doubt, frustration, and unwillingness to do anything except stare at a blank page and wonder why you couldn’t have become an accountant instead.
You will likely try to explain the depths of your frustration to your friend and they will say something in the vein of “uh huh” like you have spoken in a foreign language they took in high school, but have since forgotten.
To most non-writers, authors are filled with an infinite well of creative juice that squirts on the page with no problem. It’s easy, right? All you have to do is create.
While your friend may not understand, at least they can distract you with stories about their horrible boss or flakey co-workers.
7. Your Characters Aren’t You
Well, they are versions of you; tiny flakes of your personality. Nonetheless, your character’s thoughts and feelings aren’t necessarily a reflection of your own. If you write a story about someone beaten by their alcoholic mother, you might find your friend staring at you with watery-eyes asking if you’re okay. If you write a story in which someone contemplates suicide, you may discover a 1-800 number in your coat pocket.
A writer has to wear many masks in order to depict someone other than themselves. This is difficult to explain to someone who is so close to the original face.
Don’t judge your friend too harshly. After all, they are trying to looking out for you.
8. Rewrites
Some writers rewrite 3 times. Some writers rewrite 30 times. Regardless of how many times you must do it, rewriting is a teeth-pulling endeavor. All your previous problems are thrown back in your face. You must write a beloved character out of existence for the sake of the plot. You have to cut a scene you worked literally hours on because it no longer fits the new direction your story is taking.
It’s like Groundhog Day, only you feel like Bill Murray’s character during the suicide scene all the time. “Why are you writing it again?” your friend may ask. “Why don’t you just publish it the way it is?”
They mean well. They simply don’t understand that writing means rewriting. The first draft is usually a disaster, as is the second, or even the third. Books don’t just happen. They are cultivated through months, perhaps even years, of intense labor. Writing isn’t always a walk in the park, in spite of the fact you can do it from home in your pjs. It requires discipline and rewriting is one of the necessary steps to make towards completion.
9. You Need Feedback
Tell me if this sounds familiar: You give your friend a chapter, either through email or in person, and you’re left to wait. You check your phone religiously, you browse your emails, you watch TV, but you can’t pay attention to anything. Will your friend laugh at that joke? Will they internalize that bit of foreshadow? Ooh. You should have edited out that scene. It didn’t end up going anywhere in the long run. At long last, your friend texts you.
“It was good,” they say.
You pause for a moment, wondering if they will explain.
“Great,” you type, “What’d you like about it?”
“I don’t know. I just thought it was good.”
You press them for more information, but they refuse to divulge anymore insight into what they thought. Your non-writer friend doesn’t realize that you aren’t fishing for complements. You are asking because you genuinely want to improve your writing. Literary agents won’t hesitate to criticize, so you need your manuscript to be in top form before you start sending it out. Call us needy, but feedback (positive or negative) is as critical to the writing process as ink and paper.
You know your characters backwards and forwards and, as a result, you may unconsciously withhold important information that the reader needs to know in order to make them more relatable.
Something about the the societal structure or a character’s motivation may not make a lot of sense to the reader if they’re going in blind, but you wouldn’t know because you’re too close to the material.
10. You Can’t Stop (And You Won’t Stop)
A writer may face years of rejection and failure. It’s an inconvenient truth. In spite of all the Instagram pics and empty platitudes plastered over the internet, when most people fail their next move is to search for the exit. Especially when they choose an unconventional career that requires self-discipline and low guarantee of financial success.
You’ll vent to your non-writer friend about the struggle. All the years of toiling over a keyboard and the closets full of rejection letters.
And then they will ask the fated question: “Why don’t you quit and find another job?”
Many writers have a second job to supplement their income. However, to just quit being a writer isn’t optional. A banker can quit being a banker. A grocery store clerk can stop being a grocery store clerk. But a writer doesn’t stop being a writer.
Even if a writer only publishes one book in their lifetime, they still write. They still have to ask themselves “what if?” and play with concepts. Being a writer is a state of mind and you can’t stop. You may want to, but the desire to create is still buried in your brain.
The Crooked Pen 
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