By Gary Earl Ross
Buffalo, NY – Often I am asked what makes someone a writer. Nowadays, thanks to the internet, print-on-demand technology, writing workshops, and open mike nights, anyone can be a writer. Right? The following 10-point checklist is offered in the style of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Every aspiring writer is invited to engage in honest self-diagnosis.
1) You avoid troubling yourself about such things as grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation because real writers write from the heart. If a reader can't understand you, it's the reader's fault.
2) You join a writer's group so people can listen to your work and validate your genius but you don't care to listen to the work of others. Corollary One: You are brilliant, waiting to get rich from writing, and find even constructive criticism a waste of time. Corollary Two: You want constructive criticism? I'll give you constructive criticism.
3) You aren't concerned about rewriting because you always say it right the first time. Corollary One: Hey, everybody, listen up. I just wrote this a few minutes ago. Corollary Two: Reciting a hot poem in your best Barry White voice is a great way to get phone numbers from the ladies, but if you say, "I want a stallion I can ride all night long," note that a stallion is a boy horse.
4) You avoid trivial things like facts and research. Who cares if Roman togas didn't have zippers or the Old West lacked automatic weapons or pythons aren't poisonous? Your story is so compelling no one will notice.
5) You don't need to create your own characters because Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas have already taken care of that for you.
6) You seldom worry about consistency. So the bedroom walls were blue in the second chapter and green in the ninth. Most readers will be so relieved your heroine rescued her baby from the crib before the poisonous python could bite him that when she puts him to bed the next night, they won't ask what happened to the snake last seen coiled in the corner.
7) The passive voice that is used by you, with a passion that is embraced by you, is the most effective way for the story written by you to be appreciated by the reader by whom it was bought.
8) You believe writers must show off their sesquipedalianism (which means using really big words) and their fancy sentence structure so readers will know how smart they are. Corollary One: Slowly and laboriously, on his umbrageous venter and with great algedonic effectuation, he moved up the stridulous stairs, one at a time, one after the other, until, at last, he attained the summit is much better than Roger crawled on his belly up the old wooden stairs.
9) You write only love poems full of heaving bosoms, throbbing loins, burning desires, aching hearts, tears for lost love, and frequent use of the word forever.
10) You write but you don't read. Corollary One: You write poetry but you don't read poetry because most of it doesn't rhyme anymore. Corollary Two: You write fiction but don't read it because modern fiction is self-indulgent crap full of needless conflict. What the world really needs is a science fiction retread of Pilgrim's Progress that tones down the rousing action of the original. Corollary Three: You don't read other writers because you don't want your work to be derivative. Corollary Four: You think It was all a dream! is an original surprise ending.
If you answered yes to any item on this checklist, please let go. Drop the pen. Step away from the keyboard now, not because you can't write but because you refuse to learn how.
Gary Earl Ross is a professor at the UB Educational Opportunity Center. His latest book is the Buffalo-based historical adventure Blackbird Rising, A Novel of the American Spirit.