writer: n. One who commits his thoughts, ideas, &c., to writing. (Webster’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary) synonyms: author, novelist, inditer, belletrist, scrivener, amanuensis
“Are you a serious writer?”
Allow me to define what a serious writer is exactly. He is someone who has fallen prey to the dreaded and most uncomfortable disease known as—well, I don’t know exactly what it is known as; I don’t believe it has ever been clinically diagnosed. I shall give it the name invented by my learned colleague—graphomania.
Although graphomania sometimes manifests itself in physical symptoms (such as wearing a pencil behind one’s ear, a blank, far-off look, or a callous on the last knuckle of the middle finger of the right hand), it affects most directly the mental processes. One who has the disease is not quite rational. He sees in a blank sheet of paper an un-scaled Everest; feels himself, with a good pen in his fingers, an armed warrior; and hears in the grind of a pencil sharpener a clarion call to arms. His writing is his world,and he does not function very well outside of it.
Merely writing does not make a person a victim to the disease, although it may predispose to it. There are those who can putter among the inkpots with impunity. When you ask such people why they write, they may reply with utopian ideas of fame, fortune, or influence, while other less ambitious and perhaps more sincere admirers of the art say they write for fun. If someone ever tells you he writes for Fun, you will know he is safe. No one who has graphomania writes merely for Fun. Should you ask a graphomaniac why he writes he will likely give you rather a puzzled look and you will see that he had not considered the why as yet. He writes because he must, because he can’t help it, and even when it is not Fun, which it very often isn’t.
The disease is, in fact, very troublesome to the person who is afflicted by it. Writing seems a simple enough task to the uninitiated, but when once it is entered upon, its innocent exterior proves to be misleading in the extreme. It isn’t easy at all to translate one’s thoughts into a visible form; it is a hard and thankless task and is only learnt well by much experience. Almost every writer begins his career with a disproportionate amount of failure.
Graphomania not only takes much of a person’s useful time by forcing him to spend it in useless writing, it deprives him of many ordinary pleasures as well. Graphomaniacs are often voracious readers at some point in their lives. However, they will generally begin to find that they cannot enjoy books like they once used to. If it is a poorly written book that the sufferer is reading he will drive himself distracted by repeatedly exclaiming at different parts of the story, “Not that way; that’s not how it should happen! Make him do it this way!” while the story plods inexorably on, without paying the least attention to his excellent suggestions. If he is listening to the book being read aloud he will ruin the story and make all the other listeners very angry with him by matter-of-factly telling them which characters will get married, which characters will die, and which one is the carefully-disguised villain, all before the first chapter is halfway finished. The fact that he is always right does nothing to lessen the offence.
On the other hand, if he is reading a book by a very good writer (say, Robert Louis Stevenson or Agatha Christie), he will enjoy every bit of it but be driven to tears and wild despair by the firm conviction that he will never be able to write so well as that, never!
I don’t mean to say that the disease is entirely without its good side. Some diseases impair the normal functions of the mind, while compensating for this by giving extraordinarily sharp perception in unusual directions. Graphomania works in this way by generally giving the person who has it only a very vague perception of what is going on around him while what is taking place in his mind absorbs the greater part of his thought. However, on occasion he will be more aware of outward circumstances than other people are. He may see great significance in an occurrence that no one else notices, and be heard to mutter, “I should put that in a story sometime.”
In the first stages, a person infected with graphomania begins to feel that everything is not quite right with the world. He is vaguely dissatisfied with The Way Things Are and rather wishes they would be some other way—rather like they are, for instance, in his favourite novel. For him, the universe does not measure up. This often drives him, if not to suicide, to the next stage of the disease which is trying to change all that in his mind at least by making up stories of his own where everything is as he would like it to be.
The disease might very well stop here, but it doesn’t. Or not generally, anyway. This is all owing to, and can be blamed on, the utter un-imaginativeness of society in general and the graphomaniac’s personal chums in particular. When he tries to talk with them about The Way He Would Like Things to Be they aren’t interested because they are content, more or less, with The Way Things Are.
At this point, he either becomes a hermit in some secluded cave somewhere, or he goes on to the next stage which is trying to put his ideas out on paper. His first attempts in this direction often meet with failure, but the nature of the disease is such that it will not allow this to deter him, but will drive him on even against his will.
By this time the infected person’s friends and family will begin to notice that he is different. He spends more time writing than can really be good for him and his other work begins to suffer. He will often smile over nothing in particular and acquires a disconcerting habit of laughing suddenly when there is nothing visible to laugh at. Some days however he will be in the depths of despair over nothing more dreadful than that he is “stuck” in one of his stories and can’t figure out what to make happen next. Moreover, he appears to know a lot of people that no one else has ever heard of and when asked by the confused observer whom he is talking about he will reply carelessly, “Oh, he’s a character in one of my stories, that’s all.”
They try to be understanding—after all, artists are supposed to be rather, well, odd, you know. He’s only absent-minded because he is working on some colossal work that will one day be on the New York Times’s best-sellers list. One mustn’t mind a little peculiarity, but try to understand him. So they will try to appear interested in his book, ask him what it is about, and generously offer to read it when it is finished. They are often surprised to find him far more lacking in confidence than they themselves, as he explains in embarrassment that it isn’t finished yet, that it may never be finished, and that it probably won’t be worth reading when it is.
“Why ever spend all that time writing it, then?” they think, and sometimes if not very polite, ask. He can’t give a satisfactory answer. “It’s all on account of my graphomania, you know; dreadfully bad this season,” doesn’t convince them. “I don’t think there really is such a disease—at least I’ve never heard of it,” they say; “it’s all in your head.” This information is extraneous because the victim of the disease already knows that it is all in his head and that he can’t get rid of it no matter how hard he tries.
Oh yes, he will have tried to give it all up. Time and again he will shake himself and say, “Now you know this is all a waste of time. You’ve never written anything worth-while and likely you never will. Chuck it all and try to interest yourself in sports or something people will understand.”
He may get on in this resolve for some time—several days perhaps. Then, just when he isn’t expecting it, he will find himself thinking about one of his stories, or something will remind him of one of his characters, and he will think, “I never did figure out what to make happen in that part, you know.” Then he will remember that he is through with all that and think resolutely about something else, but the world will seem a lustreless place all at once. It is then that he realises that he will never be through with it—that he will never be able to give it all up. Writing has become a part of him and with all its disadvantages he loves it and wouldn’t part with it for anything.
Lest I unduly alarm the reader, let me hasten to add that people with graphomania have been known to lead, I cannot say a normal, but more or less a comfortable existence (Victor Hugo lived to be eighty-three).
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