Occupational Alternatives to Being Called a “Writer’s Writer”

A Therapist’s Writer

You’re working on a “novel in dialogue” that will take 45 minutes to read and cost $350.

A Mortician’s Writer

Your source material usually isn’t great, and the best you can hope for is for critics to shuffle past and mutter that you “did a nice job under the circumstances.”

A Waiter’s Writer

You’re keenly attentive to your audience’s tastes and aversions, and yet, in their Goodreads reviews, people still mention that one time you were rude to their fiancé at brunch.

A Zookeeper’s Writer

You care deeply about your characters and are invested in their well-being, and yet at any given time at least one of them is masturbating in broad daylight.

An Airline Pilot’s Writer

You keep disrupting an otherwise peaceful, if not mediocre, experience by interjecting yourself to needlessly explain details in a way that is neither pleasant nor additive.

A Coke Dealer’s Writer

You tell your editor you have the “purest shit in the world,” then promise you’ll deliver in 10-15 minutes when really you’re on your couch playing Assassin’s Creed. Three hours later you show up with only enough material to produce two or three decent lines at most.

A Grifter’s Writer

Your novel features a new character every chapter who has to pay back the investments of all the previous characters just to participate.

A Construction Worker’s Writer

You smoke pot every day at lunch and never waste an opportunity to crudely opine on a woman’s breasts.

A Lawyer’s Writer

Every chapter of your novel has its own preface, prologue, foreword, and introduction. You love parentheticals and dependent clauses. You also require people to countersign your book at readings.

A Magician’s Writer

You over-rely on cheap gimmicks and flashy reveals. And the one time you tried out your material at a birthday party, everyone either started crying or shit themselves.

A Tech Entrepreneur’s Writer

You steal someone else’s work, change a line or two to cover your ass, publish without an acknowledgments section, and then take out a full-page apology ad after you’ve more than earned out your advance.

A Farmer’s Writer

You often refer to your manuscript as “this pile of horseshit I’m working on.”

A Private Detective’s Writer

Critics describe your prose as “muscular” and “rugged,” and over time you’ve become venerated as an “enigmatic” and “elusive” literary persona. In reality, though, you’re an alcoholic, divorced dad behind on child support.

An Interior Decorator’s Writer

You dazzle your editor with visions of what you could accomplish with more time and money. You also won’t stop talking about shiplap.

A Judge’s Writer

Your tone suggests great authority, but your opinions and prejudices are baldly transparent. Also your sentences are too long.

An IKEA Furniture Designer’s Writer

Your work’s fundamental contradiction is its lack of aesthetic depth yet abundance of internal complexity. Your ability to frustrate is legend, as are your meatballs.

A Shoemaker’s Writer

You once wrote a pages-long meditation on shoelace friction. You are literally Nicholson Baker.