The Terrible!Truth!

About writers.

LowerManhattanite (pictured above) is so full of it.

He’s over at the GNB right this minute trying to convince a gullible public that writing is actual work.

That the people who till the inky vineyards actually care and fret and labor, and at the end of that long day most still can’t keep the wolf from the door without a job-job.

Here’s part of it:

...
I won't front. [Joss] Whedon notes that the “poncey” writer's manque is a tough one to defend. We write. We don't tar streets, or heft swollen trash bags into ooze-dripping trucks. We write. We wrack our brains looking for the right sequence of words and situations so that a show, or a movie, or whatever we're writing kind of works. We don't always succeed. The same way a tarred street will sometimes go soft and gooey a month after being laid, or how you'll come outside to see a trail of embarrassing trash from your curb to the street. We do fuck up. But for the most part, we sweat the details, and pour our hearts and souls into this stuff because in the end, if we're lucky—our names go on it—for ever and ever. When you think of a particularly bad episode of a show you've seen—especially a famously bad episode, it takes all of twenty seconds to Google the culprit's name. The pitiful beast's author.

That's forever, baby. And that author knows it. Imagine your worst work fuck-up being findable and attributable to you by anyone with a 2600 baud modem.

So you work hard to not have that happen to you. There are hacks among us, but the vast majority bust our asses...big time.

And believe it or not, not just as writers. A large majority of the writers I know can't make ends meet on what they make just as a writer. They have a nine-to-five doing something else. Some work as copywriters in publishing. Some work in retail. Others bartend, Two others I know work as a cable TV repair technician and IT troubleshooter respectively.

Another one works for the Parks Department, pruning and mulching trees damaged by storms.

Only one of 'em swings all the bills alone. The rest are either married or significantly-othered up, so expenses are shared. Nobody I know is rich.
…

What he will not tell you is what every writer knows but will not tell you. That despite external appearances of normalcy and a fidelity to craft that any decent plumber or bricklayer would recognize and respect, writers really get all of their ideas, inspiration, editorial chops, and narrative vision not from hard work, practice and mercilessly ransacking the lives and pain of everyone they have ever met to serve the Muse…

…but from the mystical powers emanating from pair after pair of the hand-stitched, superhero Underoos

each of them are issued each and every month from the day they are taken up to the Old Tolstoy Place on Big Rock Candy Mountain

and initiated into the mysteries of the Ancient and Spiffy Order of Wordslingers.

An Order whose limitless wrath I have now incurred by broaching this most inner-sanctumy of their secrets, and who will now no doubt dispatch their myrmidon hordes (“The Doggerels of War” as they are known up at the lodge) to hunt me down and eliminate me.

But someone had to tell you all The Awful Truth.

That writers live lives of unimaginable luxury and laziness.

That the Underoos from which their gifts really spring are made from the spin of special, genetically-upfurbished silkworms which are fed naught but Vosges Chocolate and the tenderest, center-cut verso pages carefully razored from hand-tooled vellum first folios of “Vanity Fair”.

Fatted on this rare diet, each worm expires after 62 years, during which it has produced nothing but wormfarts and an occasional book on process management. However during its death throes it extrudes a single inch of nearly invisible silk thread, after which each worm must be ritually buried in a tiny coffin made from onyx which tradition permits be mined from a sacred mountain only one night each year during the dark of the moon.

Each morning, the threads are gathered – still damp from the death-sweat of its spinner -- and borne by barge to a secret, ancient jungle lair where they are individually dyed using powders and oils extracted from coccyx and tongues of animals so rare that they appear in no textbook on Earth, and the letters that form their names have never been strung together before in the history of man.

(Willy Wonka, it is said, according to a bootlegged copy of his unpublished biography -- “Wonka Unbound” -- was able to secure a small cameo of one of the island’s menagerie at the cost of a pile of pure, unstepped Wonkain the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza, but as of this writing the neither the existence of the island, nor the cameo, nor Wonka, nor Wonka’s infamous “fizzy lifting weasel dust” cannot be confirmed.

That is just a small measure of how globe-spanning this conspiracy is in its reach, and how insidious in its influence.)

From there these threads are slow dried in oasts made from jewel-encrusted fossilized skulls of ichthyosaurs, and then spliced together into longer strands by platinum nanites wielding microscopic knitting needles made from splinters of the True Cross.

Finally, as a cost-saving measure (because Management isn’t made of fucking money, y’know), the bundles of dyed thread are transshipped to barbed-wire-enclosed, Republican-supported slave-labor camps somewhere in Northern Marianas islands where they are sewn into lavish, magical writer’s undergarments.

And every single working writer has a closet-full of them!

When they tire of one pair, they dress their pets in them. Their robot sex dolls. Their legions of valets, chauffeurs, maids and concubines (And concuboys. And, yes, I’m looking at you Tiny Fey!)

Then, once a month, they gather up at the Old Tolstoy Place to incinerate the really old pairs in the light of the Eternal Underoo Pyre; dousing the pile with rare 2nd Century oil of spikenard, sparking it up with million dollar bills, and dancing in a big, nekkid circle, laughing at all the rubes who think real writing is real work.

And now, having spilled the Magic Beans, my fate is sealed.

Remember me as a peace-maker.

Also an ass-grabber.