Metawriting

The first sign a writer is hard up for a topic to write about is the writer begins to write about the craft of writing.. Unless the reader happens to be a writer or aspiring writer, deep rooted boredom will set in. There is no reason to read something on a topic that has nothing to do with your life when there are Maxim’s and Glamour’s to be read.

When a writer writes about writing, it is called ‘metawriting’. The most annoying thing about metawriting is the self-referential statements like “this sentence contains the word ‘self-referential.’” All of this, while a bitter disappointment to a reader who wants to read something with wit and verve, is a necessity to the writer with writer’s block.

In each writer is the hope that as long as the quill is moving and the ink is flowing, the block that is preventing a masterpiece of literature from being crafted will crumble. That rarely happens.

Lately, as I struggle with my own craft, I’ve been seeking out places willing to pay money for my work. There is always a demand for writing. Every catalogue, website, or encyclopedia needs a writer [note to self: develop a character who is a writer who writes for an encyclopedia on writing]. In this fruitless search, I’ve come across one publication that wanted a writer to ghost write articles on finance as if the articles were written by a dog.

I’m not making this up. Such a premise is rather stupid to be a conceit to further this tale regarding writing. The ad that was asking for these bits of written work didn’t indicate the publication that would be using these works. I was left wondering if it was a magazine for people who loved dogs or a magazine for those people interested in finance. In either case, I can’t see where a dog would be a sound investment advisor. I could see it if a dog had once made a fortune on a stock market or scrimped and saved over time to buy a house of his own, but really, do dogs even know what money is?

I don’t even think we regard dogs as inherently good at economy. Ants understand the need to save, or at least the parable of the ant and the grasshoppers leads us to conclude they are. Squirrels know about stockpiling, but the truth of squirrels is they don’t remember the location of the stuff they stockpile and in the winter different squirrels randomly find the stockpiles. So a squirrel that is saving isn’t necessarily protecting his future, but the future of other squirrels.

Dogs bury bones, I guess. If I were to write such an article, I think I would do a pun thing based off of bones and bonuses. You know, when you get a bone/bonus, don’t eat it/spend it all, instead bury/save part of it for later. It wouldn’t be a very good article, but honestly, if you’ve taken the time to actually read those personal finance advice columns that is about the level of intelligence they offer.

The odd thing is, as a writer, I find the concept of writing about a dog’s perspective of finance to be kind of interesting. As you can probably tell, I’ve already given it some amount of thought.

Before the original point is completely lost, the idea is writers write about writing as an excuse to not write about stupid things like a dog’s perspective of finance. A writer knows that once he steps onto that path, selling his skill to craft something like this there is no turning back. If Michelangelo had painted signs for vendors at the market instead of works of art, he wouldn’t have ever been known. As I mentioned earlier, there is no shortage of need for writers. There is always a need for another list of the 5 Reasons Why Men Leave the Toilet Sit Up or 16 Ways to Spruce Up Window Bunting.

When you aspire to be a Hemingway or even a Piers Anthony, you can’t if you take that path, that path of selling your skills to craft things that will be thrown out in a month for a newer version of the same thing you had written. When you aspire to write a masterpiece, you are aspiring to immortalize your craft. Every writer wants to write that one piece of literature, one couplet of poetry that others will memorize, keep in their hearts, and repeat hundreds of times in their lifetime.

There is nothing wrong with the writer who does take the path of writing unremarkable things. That writer will have a career and a steady paycheck. The world only has so much room for Steinbeck’s and Grisham’s. There can only be one Tom Clancy and everyone else is a pretender. When a writer writes about writing, you have to forgive him. He is only trying to stay away from that path of writing those things that may be a path to a steady paycheck, but won’t inspire a reader any longer than it takes the reader to flip the page to the next list of things that will make the reader’s life so fantastic that the reader will no longer have a need to buy the magazine that gives out all the advice.

Sometimes, the writer may actually even writer something profound enough about writing that even the most disinterested reader will perk up and take notice. Maybe there is some advice, some element of reasoning in the writer’s opinions regarding writing that might apply to other aspects of the reader’s life. That would be the sign of a skilled writer, though and would be remarkably rare. More likely there wouldn’t be much in the piece that applied to anyone but that particular writer. Such is the nature of the business though. Universal lessons just aren’t that easy to develop, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.