What Kind of Idiot Writes

No writers found anywhere along this coastline.

After spending last Saturday morning in a windowless room in the back of a Claim Jumper Restaurant conveniently located off the 405 listening to an author explain to my monthly writer’s group how to “cut the flab” from their masterpieces, it occurred to me that I was surrounded by a flock of dodos.  Yes, I’m referring to what Webster defines as, “an extinct flightless bird with a stout body, stumpy wings, a large head, and a heavy hooked bill. While the physical features may not have pertained to all those gathered, the reference to the phrase, “dead as a dodo meaning no longer effective, valid or interesting,” fit like a glove.

Even after the sun sets and this light comes
on, no writers will be found along this beach.

To make matters worse, although the guest speaker shared a tale of how she planned to sever her relationship with her agent, the rest of us compared notes on the number of rejections we had received from these literary gatekeepers, or worse still spoke of self-publishing. In an age where your average consumer of the written word is measured by the number of tweets, text messages or tags on Facebook she receives on a daily basis, the idea of spending time writing even a thousand word parcel of flash fiction, let alone a short story or a novel seems absurd. If people truly crave characters, plot development, setting, themes, morals, or a beginning, middle and end, they download Netflix, YouTube, reruns of Jersey Shores, or cool off at the local multiplex.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a
famous character, not a writer.
Even birds have more sense.

I mean, who reads anymore? All right, so you’ve been caught, but don’t worry the number of hits on this, and nearly all other blogs, continues to fall. More often than not the web browsers look for highlighted text to click on to get some video talking head or action scene. Words for words sake seem superfluous with all the out-of-work actors available to recite or perform the necessary communication. Whenever anyone says to read between the lines today, they are instructing an actor to take a dramatic pause in the dialogue or asking an audience to recognize a change of setting without the protracted chase in between, no reading or inferences needed.

During the course of the past week, my lovely wife Debbie, whose beautiful photography adorns this post, made two separate trips with two different sets of people to the beach, while I stayed at home and wrote. True, the window is open with a slight breeze blowing in my direction. The plumeria (see previous post) still fills my vision beyond the screen. Palms are observable a few doors away, but it seems useless to argue, “It’s just as good as being at the beach.”

According to every book on writing I have ever read there is only one reason writers write. They write because they must. Their power to resist the opportunity to scratch the itch is even less than the fox strolling past the chicken coop (that’s the proverbial hen house for those limited to literal metaphors). Indeed, we are so masochistic we willingly become an anachronism.

So, while my wife enjoys the sun setting over the ocean, the salty air drifting gently to cool her summer skin, I peck away at another revision of a short story for some literary journal nobody has ever heard of, or start writing the second novel before the first is sold.