Feature Article
Three (fraught) Little Words: “I’m a Writer.”
By Alison Owings
We all know stories about doctors at cocktail parties wary of confessing what they do for a living, for fear of unleashing the knee injury, high blood pressure, kind-of-hurts-right-here complaints sure to follow. I bet that plenty of other professionals—lawyers, tax specialists, roofers—react to the “So, what do you do?” question with equal skittishness. In fact, given the risks, I’m surprised how regularly people in the “helping” professions turn up at social events. On the other hand, I’ve never heard any of the people who corner them for a private consult respond with “Really? I’m a doctor/lawyer/tax specialist/roofer too.”
That’s a trick they save for writers.
When a stranger asks, “So, what do you do?” my three-word answer, “I’m a writer,” inevitably opens the floodgates. The stranger, the stranger’s relative, or the stranger’s good friend, is also a writer. True, in a land where the alphabet is part of our common heritage, most of us can write, as most of us with an intact voice can sing, as most of us with an intact hand can paint, as most of us with an intact body can act. Whether the words “I’m a singer,” “I’m a painter,” “I’m an actor,” elicit similar reactions, I do not know. I know only the reaction—make that reactions—to “I’m a writer.”
After so many people have told me that they, or someone they know, is a writer, I begin to wonder if my own three little words imply that a) “I am pretending to be a more cultured person than you are or I wouldn’t try to distinguish myself by mentioning a daily activity we all share,” or b) “We are all one and I am especially eager to learn of our commonality.”
It must be b.
In turn, b has become, to me, a lay version of a church-like call and response.
I first became aware of the phenomenon many years ago, when “I’m a writer” led to the assertion that so was my questioner’s cousin, who wrote articles for a magazine for flight attendants. “Uh huh,” I said, nodding convivially. In the ensuing years, a hundred calls and responses followed. The number of people who write or know people who write, or—the latest more heartening category—plan to write, is amazing. (To the plan-to-writes I then can add, “I also edit. Here’s my card if you need help.”)
A related response comes from people who, after diligently professing to want to know the subjects of my past books (women in the Third Reich, American waitresses) tell me in so many words how I missed the boat by not interviewing them, or someone they knew, or that really, they could have written my book themselves. “Uh huh,” I reply, and sometimes manage a rueful smile. “Too late!”
In quantity, though, the people who are not interested in a follow-up question, such as, “What?” stand out. My latest “I’m a writer” response brought the response that the questioner, a gym trainer I had engaged for a rare one-hour session, was writing an article about nutrition for a (locally ridiculed) local newspaper. “Uh huh,” I said. “Great.” What I thought was, Damn. I knew I should have replied, “Oh, this and that,” for my quest to learn more ab exercises during this precious and finite amount of time was now being supplanted by my trainer’s monologue—how flattered he was by the assignment, what he planned to write about, how this might lead to a best-selling book. . . . My silence eventually brought us back to more salient matters, like obliques (a muscle group that was such news to me until recently that I had to spell check it).
A few days later, a dour mechanic who had just changed the oil in my car and noted that the oil cap was gummy because I must be making too many short trips, asked The Question. Following the pause following my reply, he said he reads mostly about sports and doesn’t like it when writers show off big words that he suspects they’ve just learned.
“Uh huh,” I said. I should not have added, in an attempt to bond (as one must with a mechanic, however dour), that Annie Proulx sends me to the dictionary, and which newspapers supposedly have good sportswriters. He was still ticked off about my gummy oil cap and big words.
What I never have a chance to explain is that “I’m a writer” is basically a job description. It is not meant as affirmation that I am either a good writer or a successful one, however success is defined. It means that I sit a lot and write. True, it implies publication. One of my favorite old New Yorker cartoons involved two men at a party, one saying to the other, “No, I haven’t been published, but I have been professionally typed.”
Sometimes, responses to The Answer to the Question have been ego-buoying. Some questioners have read my work, a thrill to me, of course. Other questioners follow up by asking what I have written instead of using the three little words as a springboard for talking about themselves. When this happens (women ask more often than men do) I happily prattle on about past books and what I’m working on now (an oral history of Native Americans about contemporary life, yes, thanks, Rutgers University Press, oh, a Passamaquoddy in Maine and an Ojibwe in Minnesota, and a Navajo medicine man, among others, but I have to get to Oklahoma, and gee, you’re right, funding is such a huge challenge I’ve considered hanging out at fancy Santa Fe galleries and looking for white guys sporting much turquoise and seeing if they’d like to donate to my book), but at some point, after not that much prattling, I always add, “So, what do you do?”
Writers love to ask questions, if given the opportunity. Φ
Alison Owings is in the last year of writing Listening to Native Americans (working title), to be published by Rutgers University Press. She is the author of Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich and Hey, Waitress!: The USA from the Other Side of the Tray. She also works as a freelance editor, viz, www.alisonowings.com, and has been an Authors Guild member since 2003.
