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So You Call Yourself a Writer

By Sarah Stodola

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As a writer, my least favorite question in life is this: "What kind of writer do you want to be?" Aside from the fact that it implies I am somehow not yet a writer even though I have been at it for years, it also perpetually leaves me without a sufficient answer. It always makes me feel that, as a writer, I should be more sure of just what exactly it is that I'm writing.

My answer lately is usually something like this: "I like to write all kinds of things, I'm not really limited to one genre or category." Which, of course, is not really an answer at all.

Part of the problem with the question of what kind of writer I am (or "want to be" if that’s the way you’re going to be) is that everyone asks the same question. The only people who don't ask the question are other writers or people who know a lot of writers, because they understand the impossibility of the question. Unfortunately, they are also possibly among the only ones who could really understand the answer. No matter which perspective a person is coming to you from, they always ask the same question, which exacerbates the confusion, because some people know nothing about the intricacies of being a writer and some people know quite a lot. So that same question takes on quite different meanings, depending on whom you are speaking with, making a standard response impossible.

Deciding what kind of writer you are is like deciding what kind of person you are; you may have an idea of it, but there is no simple answer. And it is very likely that you don't want to be the kind of person who is defined by just one trait, but one who is complex and interesting, thereby a conglomeration of many traits. In other words, you want to be many kinds of people at once. For most of us, that's just what we are. And writers are people too, remember.

It would be so simple if I wrote crime fiction, or romance, or if I were a reporter. Those are very clear categories. But also they are categories that most writers do not fit into.

Saying that I write fiction or personal essays or cultural criticism does nothing to explain my writing, and anyway these categories are neither inelastic nor inexorable. They are loose labels that we attach to certain forms of writing in order to make sense of them and, I suspect, to give publishers and writing schools a way to more clearly market the products they sell.

I rarely write a personal essay, for example, that doesn't also contain a hint of criticism or politicism or yes, even fiction. The converse can easily be said of most fiction - they say there is no fiction without some truth in it, and also none that is not at least partially autobiographical. And couldn't literary criticism simply be a method of examining how literature is relevant to the rest of the world, or to "real life"?

I certainly don't consider myself a humor writer, but that doesn't mean that I don't try to include humor in my writing. I think it's a great talent who can make the reader chuckle out loud, but in the case of my own writing I want that chuckle to be brought on by a more profound understanding; I want it to be an admiring chuckle, a chuckle that says, That's a really good point she just made. In other words, I don't want humor to be the focus of my writing, but rather just one of many literary tools; a byproduct of a larger point that is hopefully being relayed.

I also don't consider myself a literary writer, in the strict sense, because if I did I would feel too much pressure to be serious. "Serious" writers are notorious for their lack of a sense of irony or a sense of humor, and I think both of these are valuable elements in good writing. In addition, the “serious” writer is too often excessively influenced by current trends and notions of high culture. I don’t want to be confined to what passes for high culture at any given moment.

I suppose I don’t want to be any kind of writer; just a writer. In an ideal universe I would be so good and so lucky that I would create my own kind of writing, and just as some writing is “Kafkaesque,” some would also be “in the Stodola tradition.” But I am a realist, at least some of the time, and so I readily acknowledge that all I really want is to be a writer. The kind whose work people like to read. The kind who gets to make a living out of it. The kind who no longer gets questioned about what kind of writer they want to be because just maybe people will already know without having to ask.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three