It’s Not Easy Being A Writer
There are some things that are hard for people to relate to unless
they are shown, or at least told, how difficult they are. We see TV shows about cops and rescue people
and doctors and we say to ourselves “wow, those are really difficult jobs to
do”. Reality TV is filled with people
who tell you that what they do is really hard work. It’s not all glitz and glamour and pretty
things.
Well, so too is being a writer.
I’ve been an online columnist for over two decades now. During that time, I’ve been posting original
columns every week for forty-five-or-so-weeks per year. (Yes, I
take the holidays off.) That comes
in addition to the other activities that I do that involve writing; for
instance, when I was working with either Talk Liberty or Shocknet Radio. That also includes the work that I do for
other projects such as Battlerock
Comics and Hero Corner. I also proofread for the work of other
people, such as with the City of Comic
Creators.
None of these things, I should point out, that I get paid
for. Not a dime. I don’t even get attention for some of these
things. I struggle to get someone to
notice them and then I’ll be lucky if I get even so much as a single bit of
feedback. But I still do these things
because they involve things that I like doing.
These are a labor of love for me, even if I don’t get any love back.
But then there are the things that I do that *do* pay the
bills, and I am excited when I get to show off my literary skills and get paid
for doing it. Whether it is to create
step-by-step procedural instructions or to create informational material for a
safety program or even to design signs, these are things that I love to do
because I can finally get paid for being creative.
And yet, this is where I get the most difficulty.
People seem to think that being a writer means that words
just instantaneously appear. That I can
crank out volumes of material out of thin air the moment I am asked. Boy, I tell you, I wish that I could do that.
I know it seems like it comes easy to certain people. They
can churn out books every few months that seem to fly off the shelves. But the truth behind some of that is that
those “celebrities” are
using ghostwriters. It may be their
name on the cover, but it’s someone else doing the actual work. And a lot of their “success” comes from other
groups buying
those books in bulk while pretending they come from “individual”
sales. It’s a con that pays big for the
“celebrity”, but not so much for the people doing the actual work.
Let’s get brutally honest here… being a writer is work. Yes, I’m sitting (or sometimes standing) in front of a keyboard, staring at a screen
instead of moving boxes or working on an assembly line or pushing a broom, but
it is still work just the same.
Writing procedures for a task means having to mentally break
down each step and explain that process in detail, which often takes more time
to do than it does the actual task. If
you’re inspecting a part for defects and for quality assurance, then you have
in your head a few dozen things that you look out for that can take all of a
second to do, but it takes a couple of minutes for even the fastest of writers
to type them all and arrange them in a way for the reader to understand. Think about that.
Sometimes I need to do research. That means using the Internet. Well, in the eyes of too many supervisors,
the Internet is considered “leisure”. It
doesn’t matter if I’m checking with the Centers for Disease Control or looking
up the precise regulation from the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration. To those supervisors and
managers, it’s no different than if I was looking up last night’s sports scores. That’s something that I’m supposed to do “on
my own time”, even though it is part of what my job entails.
So I have to, for lack of a better term, “steal” time do to
that part of the job. Do research for a
minute, then do clerical work. Steal
another minute for research, then do some more clerical work. And yet, all of it is what I have to do for
work.
Imagine being told that you could only do half your work and
then do the rest on your own time.
Sounds crazy, right? That’s what
being a writer is sometimes. Some people
expect you to do it for free and on your own time.
And good luck trying to explain that to the supervisor or
manager. They don’t seem to understand
that it takes time to do research. It
takes time to design illustrations that people love seeing with
instructions. It takes time to spell out
in detail the things that take a fraction-of-a-second to perform. It takes time to organize all of that and
arrange it so that it is readable and easy-to-understand. It takes time to proofread it over and over
to make sure that there are no errors or anything that can be considered
confusing. These are people who can cite
the number of parts-per-minute a process should take, and yet they refuse to
recognize that it took time to write that very detail that they cite!
It doesn’t matter if you can type four-words-per-minute or
one-hundred-forty. It doesn’t matter if
you only use two fingers or all ten. It
still all takes time. And if you can’t
give that writer the time to do what you are asking them to do, then you really
must not want them to do the job.
Yes, in this high-tech society, there is an over-emphasis to
abbreviate things. We text in snippets
and emoji through trendy apps. We put
more emphasis and spend more money on football than we do on English courses. And yet someone still needs to write the
sports article and come up with the specifications for that cool app and
ghostwrite that book that you love buying but barely have time to read. The best thing that you can give the writer
besides appreciation of their work and to pay them for doing that work is to
give them the time for them to actually do it.
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