Writing is office work
Although like an eighties financier, you can drink on the job
To begin, allow me to apologise to any subscribers who don’t care about ‘writing discourse’. You have my permission to turn back – much as it will hurt my dwell stats. I won’t hold it against you when thumbing through Substack’s remarkably detailed analytics dashboard. As for the rest of you, maybe you’ll indulge me in a little inside baseball. Maybe you even want to be a ‘writer’. This post is about that, though it’s not intended to be encouraging.
At the risk of bragging, I’ve made most of my income through writing, the bulk of it in journalism, and some of it in PR and lobbying. I’ve also read a lot. Mostly non-fiction, mostly journalism, and more than I care to admit on social media. But the point is that I’m coming at this as both a producer and consumer of the written word. And I’d like to declare that writer culture is annoying.
While the kids, as Sam Harris tells me, can no longer read joined-up handwriting, writing as an activity has remained aspirational, perhaps even moreso as we wallow ever deeper in AI slop. My social media feeds, Substack chief among them, are full of posts gushing about being a writer, even as I mash the ‘hide this shite’ button. Influencers post little poetry excerpts, pictures of artfully-stacked notepads, and retreat fridges full of wine. It is not good.
Like being homosexual before we decided it was acceptable, being a writer is a ‘lifestyle choice’ quite apart from the core activity. Even people who show no inclination towards writing like the idea of sitting down in a country pile every day with a cafetière, knocking through a few hundred words before going to feed the chickens, like they’re in Tamara Drewe.
Even the depressives have their own spin on the same idea, talking of writing like it’s a stint on the Russo-Ukraine border. Various writers are even accused of making the bloodletting comparison, including a sports hack. Imagine claiming sports punditry is hard. Oscar Wilde could only claim that sarcasm was the lowest form of wit because sports punditry had yet to be invented.
Suffice to say that writing has a lot of affect, and very little effect. You can do it half cut and get away with it, unlike driving a bus, to channel Doug Stanhope. Writing is so easy you can even do it on a bus, or a park bench, or a Caribbean beach, or even a toilet seat while you curl one out.
And that’s because, fundamentally, writing is an office job.
Most of my paid-for writing has happened under cruel office lights, a pack of Monster Munch pulled from the desk drawer and placed alongside a half-drunk Pret coffee. (Unaccountably, office coffee is always awful.) Even since Covid, my writing has still occurred at a desk, often in a room shared with laundry, a television set or a bed. Right now I’m typing this from the kitchen table.
And if the location wasn’t enough of a giveaway, writing entails all the bullshit a normal office job entails, at least if you want to make a career of it. I once read that for your average book editing job, the actual editing is maybe 15% of the role. The rest is meetings, strategy, sales, promotion, emails, emails, emails. This is to say most of business is business, rather than the thing your business does.
No doubt this view is drab, and does rather besmirch the fact that when writing is at its best it is profound, moving and even life-affirming, if you can stomach that sort of thing. This Book Will Save Your Life, as one author once promised. At minimum, good writing will impress civil servants at stilted thirty-something house parties. You can list it on a Tinder profile, or Hinge or wherever people with crow’s feet go to get laid.
All good stuff, and putting words in a nice order is a noble endeavour. But it’s a noble endeavour that looks to outsiders exactly like a guy cold-calling to sell you insurance, a girl from HR finalising your performance improvement plan, or a managing director scrolling their phone while they ‘add value’. Writers are just another set of chimps hitting typewriters. We just sound better when we do it.