Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. – Robert A. Heinlein
I was in a pub the other night (it happens. I was drinking Hoegaarden. I don’t think that helps). We were having a hugely satisfactory high-brow discussion on the way different languages shape the thought-processes and psychology of their practitioners, and the concomitant influences on history and politics (This was not just the beer talking. Languages spoken fluently by the three individuals in discussion, six. I’m bilingual. So bite me). And in the course of this, I’m sure deeply-tedious-to-onlookers conversation, I am pretty sure I mentioned the fact that I write [Attempt to write - Ed] twice, possibly three times [That WAS the beer talking - Ed] (No it wasn’t. I was trying to make a point about different ways of understanding poetic idiom… Oh, never mind).
And no one so much as batted an eyelid.
Possibly it was because they were all unnecessarily well-read graduates and used to writery types. Or possibly they couldn’t hear me clearly over the baying of young professionals at the bar. Nevertheless felt as if I had luckily gotten away with some social gaffe, such as managing to fart silently, or fake a convincing sneeze to cover an unstifleable yawn. I was far to busy yammering to think about it much at the time, of course, but I woke up at six am this morning. As you invariably do on a Sunday, rather than on a Thursday, when it might come in quite useful. I lay there and mulled. I am patently unable to shut up about the writing thing completely despite several quite soul-crushing incidents – I have posted before on the things people say to budding writers. Every time I am hijacked by my inner show-off [There is no inner show-off. Deal with it - Ed] I flinch, expecting to be ignored, belittled, questioned relentlessly, teased, or (somehow worse, because deep down I like it, and this gives me heartburn) hero-worshipped just a little bit. Why was I so relieved to have had my ‘I write, I do,’ remarks treated so casually? I know some writers who would have been lying awake at dawn indulging in a wailing and gnashing of teeth at it.
And then I saw it. I had been, for possibly the second or third time only in my life, taken seriously. I wrote. It was relevant to the discussion. I was not a freak or a show-off or a neurasthenic wreck, and because what I wrote wasn’t really relevant at the time, it wasn’t discussed. I had not taken over the conversation. Reed writes. So-and-so speaks four languages. Other-chap has travelled a great deal. All equally relevant. All taken seriously. No one even so much as glanced at the state of my fingernails [Bitten to the quick, by the way. Again - Ed].
I went back to sleep.
