At the front desk

[mrissa]

At the front desk of the chiropractor's today, another patient stopped me to ask if she'd heard me correctly when I told the receptionist I was a writer. I agreed that I was. She started questioning me about how I go about it, quickly narrowing her specifications to how to get published (without, apparently, writing anything at all -- at first I thought she couldn't describe what she wanted to write, but it turns out she didn't know what she wanted to write). Okay, so that's bad enough, but plenty of people are in love with the idea of Being An Author without actually wanting to auth.

But then the [white] receptionist said to my [black] fellow patient, cheerfully, "Oh, and you'd be a shoe-in, because they're really into that black stuff these days. Y'know, multiculturalism and stuff." And my jaw dropped, and I thought, "Oh, Lord, this is the bit where this woman rips the receptionist's head off and feeds it to the squirrels." Because that's what I'd have done, for heaven's sake, and what just about every other writerbeing I know would have done.

Instead, my fellow patient nodded and said, "Oh, yeah, that's good." It is? Oh. Well. My mistake. I couldn't imagine a situation in which it would be appropriate to say, "they're really into that black stuff these days," but apparently I would have been wrong. Especially with "you'd be a shoe-in."

I'm still appalled, frankly.

Comments

Re: Say, what?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm much more tolerant of the people who have always wanted to write a novel about something specific than of the ones who just want to have their name on the cover of a book, regardless of what's in it.

Re: Say, what?

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

That's usually how I tell the posers from the serious. The serious will talk enthusiastically about what they want to write about (though as I'm sure you know, that's not always a good sign), at which point I encourage them to write it down and once done, I say, I'll show them how to research the markets.

Then there was the woman who once said I should do "real work" when I talked about wanting to be a writer. I asked her what makes her think it wasn't real work. She replied, "It's easy, isn't it? All you do is sit there and type." To which I said, "Then write a book, and come back and tell me how easy it was." I don't know if she actually tried or not, but she never said a word to me about it again.

Re: Say, what?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, there are plenty of posers who can tell you all about the book they're going to write and how fabulous it is. The trouble is, they're hard to tell from people who are about to write fabulous books.

What I hate is when people who haven't written a word patronize me and my work based on the conviction that if they had written a book when I did, theirs would have been good enough to be published by now.