Are you a Writer?

Monday, January 09, 2017

Are academics writers?

A provocative article on writing by Cydney Alexis, who runs the writing center at Kansas State, answers strongly affirmative, writers of many genres. Most of what she says are things I can easily agree with: “creative writing” exists in forms other than novels and poetry and should be banned as a term when developing writing programs at universities. People should embrace all forms of writing, not just the novel/poetry kind as being “writing.” We should make writing part of our lives as much as people have made reading, or at least as we did before the advent of YouTube and Netflix.

But one thing that I’ve wrestled with since reading this a couple of days ago: who should identify themselves as a writer? Alexis makes the point that all scholars can and do write. But is that the same as using Writer as our identity?

Certainly others have the right to embroider Writer on their lapel using the initial capital. Journalists, screen writers, bloggers, all spend their lives putting words on a computer screen. Does this also apply to incessant tweeters? And what about those who pen a novel at night while spending 40 hours a week selling insurance? Are they Writers? Or insurance salesmen who write? 

Academics write constantly, as Alexis points out, and not just research articles either: memos to the department chair, reviews of books, field notes, grant proposals, even syllabi.  And how much do we sweat over each of those written pieces? Drafts and counterdrafts. Edits and reedits. The online thesaurus always open. Lost weekends and forgotten summers trying to get it just right.  Withholding their book manuscript from their publisher, sometimes for years (grrrr), to make sure they are saying exactly what they want to say in exactly the right words (Editorial note: that rarely works). This makes them Writers, right? Not according to Alexis, whose four dozen interviewees in her dissertation research resoundingly said no:

“I began asking more people whose livelihoods depend on the written word and who write daily if they see themselves as writers. I also began asking graduate students who came to see me at various writing centers where I worked whether they considered themselves writers. And again most said no. There was something in the identity label of ‘writer’ that people have attached to a particular kind of writing.”… that is, novels, poetry, and other forms of fiction.

That hasn’t been my experience, particularly with scholars who claim to be doing arts-based research, use literary writing strategies, or who just publish a lot. Scratch the surface of most of them and they’ll identify themselves as Writers in addition to being Scholars. A year ago, when I was busy publishing them, I would haven’t given their responses a second thought. Of course they’re Writers. And good ones too.

But this year I’ve been spending a lot of time with Chuck.

We’ll call him “Chuck,” an overly-familiar moniker for Charles Dickens. Chuck has done a lot of things in his lifetime—played music, painted (both houses and canvasses), sold security systems and insurance policies, built farm houses, taught. For the past five years or so, Chuck has become a Writer of the novelist variety. He’s written two novels —probably closer to ten but he threw away all those early drafts. He buries himself in his office for most of each day, emerging occasionally for a bike ride or to walk Bobo the Boxer in the hills. He writes. And rewrites. He hasn’t sold his novels to a publisher yet, but he will. I’ve only seen one early draft of one of his books but agree that he deserves the title Writer. He’s good. And he approaches perfecting his craft as an all-day, every-day grind. Even the Facebook posts he dashes off are stories, often uncomfortably long for FB, rich in narrative and finely crafted. Put six of them together and you have chapter 8 of a novel. When passing Bobo on the street dragging Chuck behind him, he’ll rein in the dogly exuberance long enough for a short yarn, a short yarn that turns into a long yarn, one that you never want to have an end. Chuck is never not writing. While an aspiring novelist, that work ethic would be true if he were a columnist or blogger. He’s a Writer. A dream weaver of words. But also at it full time. All in.

Only by putting Chuck amidst my academic writing friends in the police lineup do I see the difference. They write, write a lot and well, but not like Chuck the Writer. Just as I differentiate a company member of the Joffrey from Gaby Diaz, who won the  2015 So You Think You Can Dance competition and now performs in Jennifer Lopez’s Las Vegas show, I would put Chuck in a different category than those very literate, very talented friends of mine. My sense of most scholars is that they are Scholars first and writers second. They may write constantly and write well, but Chuck is a Writer.

Offended that I’m challenging your identification as a Writer? You’re in good company. Cyndey Alexis agrees with you, not with me.  Just give me a few moments to find my pith helmet before you start flinging manuscripts, laptops, red pens, and copies of Strunk and White at me.

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