More Writer Than Thou
Back when I was working in tabletop games, we had a fairly well defined social hierarchy of appropriate geekness. Because I worked in tabletop RPGs, tabletop RPG players were of course at the apex of the pyramid. Beneath them were the miniatures gamers, who at least knew how to paint. Below them were the LARPers, and below them were the wargamers, and lowest of them all were the collectible card game players, who cluttered up the hallways of our precious conventions with sudden outbreaks of Magic: The Gathering and suchlike. It was all very cozy, really. Everyone who’d been sneered at had someone else to sneer at, except the CCG players, who, I have it on good authority, turned around and sneered at those weirdos who played games with books and couldn’t finance a new stereo system with proceeds from selling off a couple of unopened booster packs.
It wasn’t until much, much later that I realized that what we’d been doing could best be described as “more gamer than thou.” Our way was the true way of gaming, and everyone else was lesser because they weren’t doing it right. It was ludicrous, of course – the archetypal schoolyard bully wouldn’t care if you were a Nosferatu or a Snorlax-hugger – but it was a way of comparing ourselves to one another and finding affirmation that we were doing things right. And of course, we couldn’t be doing things right unless that guy, over there, was doing things wrong.
That’s WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, and let’s wave some torches and pitchforks while we’re at it, shall we, folks?
Scroll forward now. Years pass, and I’m a writer. I meet other writers. I work with them. I bump into them on message boards and mailing lists, collaborate with them on projects, and generally find myself increasingly immersed in writer socialization networks.
And far too often, I find myself stumbling across – and recoiling from – a single notion that remains as ridiculous now as it was when it was being applied to rosy-cheeked forty year olds clutching their Atogs and Llanowar Elves for all they were worth.
I refer to, of course, the dread disease of “More Writer Than Thou”, the older and equally pernicious sibling to “more gamer than thou”. MWTT (as I shall call it from henceforth) is as hard to define as the coastline of an amoeba and as hard to eradicate as the common cold. There’s medium-driven MWTT – “Oh, he’s just a game /television/comics/soup label” writer. There’s content-driven MWTT, as witnessed by the Sisyphean struggle of tie-in writers to garner any respect for their work. There’s genre MWTT. There’s education-based MWTT; “real” writers sneering at those who dared go get college degrees in writing for being weak and formulaic, while the college grads pooh-pooh right back at what they view as non-Euclidean grammar and unenlightening subject matter. There’s regional denigration – think about the term “regional writer” for a minute, won’t you – dismissal of writers who don’t sell and writers who sell too much, and the list goes on and on. And all of it washes up in endless angry, masturbatory emails and forum posts and drunken convention rants and God knows what else.
Digression time.
My wife once introduced me to an acquaintance of hers, whom, she explained, was a writer. Of course we had to meet, because, well, we were both writers, and thus we had to meet. This, incidentally, was well before either my wife (also a writer) and I had gotten wise to the ways of writer socializing, and understood that a strange writer is best approached with a chair and bullwhip until proven friendly, housebroken and unarmed.
Within three minutes of our introduction, this person (I’ll call her May) had told me that her proudest writing achievement was a piece of Justice League fanfic wherein she had, and I quote, “re-invented Batman as a really dark character”. She had also gone on a lengthy and vicious rant against a particular fantasy writer of immense popularity, to the point of wishing him grievous bodily harm.
I asked her if she’d read any of the author in question’s work. She hadn’t, not past a quick skimming of one of his titanic fantasy slabs. I asked if he’d ever done anything to her personally. Again, no. Befuddled, I asked why she hated him so much, then, if she’d never met him and hadn’t read his books.
“Oh,” the answer came back. “He sells too many books. He’s not a real writer.”
Now, I pass no judgment here. If May was happy writing fanfic (though reinventing Batman as a “dark” character is a lot like reinventing chocolate ice cream as a dessert), more power to her. But in unleashing her torrent of sheer hatred on the one unfortunate bestselling author, she’d indulged, nay, wallowed in, More Writer Than Thou.
Let’s think about that one for a second. Leaving aside the fact that this demonstrates MWTT to be a universal complaint – after all, if one of the least original fanfic writers this side of Krypton is denigrating one of the leading lights of her supposed favorite genre as “not a real writer”, it’s pretty clear that everyone’s a possible purveyor or target (or both) – one must ask, what good did it do?
The answer, I suspect, is not much. It certainly didn’t affect the bestselling author in question, who went on to continue writing books, selling gobs of copies of them, and cashing the immense checks that came along with doing so. Nor did it benefit May, who spent oodles of time denigrating said bestselling author instead of, well, writing. And the false sense of achievement that she got out of it, because she had somehow decided that she was a “better” writer than this particular individual, was a sop to any lingering inclinations she had about improving her craft.
That’s the real danger of More Writer Than Thou, I think, the false injection of egoboo, as exciting and destructive as anything that ever went into Roger Clemens’ pasty buttocks. The false comparison with another writer or group of writers, always favorable to the one doing the comparison, is a diversion from the actual task of writing. It’s a way to feel good by putting down what others have or haven’t done, instead of based on what the writer themselves has done.
In other words, it ain’t about the writing. It’s a dangerous, pointless habit to get into, and if you find yourself doing it, stop it immediately. You are not a really more true bona fide grade A writer type than anyone else because you A)sold more books than they did B)sold less books than they did C)got a degree from the University of Iowa’s writing workshop D)did not get a degree from the University of Iowa’s writing workshop E)wrote novels instead of short stories F)wrote short stories instead of novels G)wrote short stories and novels instead of video games H)didn’t write a particular book you didn’t like I)had an idea for a book you liked but the other guy wrote it before you did or J) don’t sully yourself with Twitter, only blogging, Facebook, Myspace, a website, a podcast, and innumerable small convention panels.
To be blunt, none of that crap matters. What the other guy does doesn’t matter, except in the sense that if the other guy writes a better book than you and gets it to the publisher first, then you’re probably out of luck. What does matter is not wasting the time building a little pillow fort of the subconscious to make you feel better about your writing instead of doing the one thing that can actually affect it.
Which is, of course, writing.
Or, to steal a page from my day job, you don’t level in writer. There’s no objective comparison, no hard and fast set of qualifications, no way to quantify who is “more” of a writer than anyone else. Time spent trying to figure it out – or more accurately, to come up with reasons to put down other writers instead of doing more of your own writing – is as useful and productive as trying to count angels on the head of a syringe.
Which is the sort of image that no real writer would ever come up with, and the guy who just wrote it is a worthless hack. Right? Right.
